


The Price of Wanting

by lirulin



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fae, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fae & Fairies, Fae Jaskier | Dandelion, Fae Magic, Fairy Tale Elements, Gen, Graphic descriptions of violence, Jaskier | Dandelion & Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg Friendship, Jaskier | Dandelion Whump, M/M, Major Original Character(s), Medical Procedures, Near Death Experiences, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Other, POV Jaskier | Dandelion, Pre-Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Self-Harm, Stitches, Vesemir - Freeform, no betas we die like men
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-02-22 12:09:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22982536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirulin/pseuds/lirulin
Summary: He hadn't the imagination to build a human from scratch at the time, when he decided that no other shape would truly suffice, so he acquired one in the grand tradition of his people. He had offered the mortal a trade, as one did, and in return for his aid, he was granted his name: Julian Alfred Pankratz.Fae!Jaskier AU.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 74
Kudos: 299
Collections: Geraskier





	1. Once upon a time, in a kingdom long ago...

Jaskier was absolutely fascinated by humans.

The very idea of them was so curious, so utterly enthralling, that when he'd exerted the effort to take a shape on this plane, he'd decided to become one. There were easier shapes to claim, of course, and he had given them due consideration...but _humans_ were just so filled with potential--so versatile--so very fantastical in all their contradictions. How could he have ever chosen something else when they were available? The brevity of them, their beauty, and the fragility of their forms, were breathtaking. Each and every one of them was alluring, all of them were special and lovely, and they captivated him. Humans were like blossoms on trees; they sprouted all at once in a beautiful array of tender, vibrant life and then were gone just as quickly, only to do it all again. Their fleeting nature was at the very core of their appeal--it made everything sweeter for the knowledge that it was and could only ever be temporary. 

It was different, it was new, and Jaskier found the appeal in that was beyond his ability to deny. 

At his core, he was a simple being. He knew _desire_ , the driving hunger that came with wanting what he did not have. He knew the delight of _having_ , of course, and he knew _wonder_ better than any creature in any sphere. When he was shaken loose from his immortal coil, when he'd tumbled into this plane, he'd spared not a single moment wondering how he might return to where he'd been before. 

Why would he when everything here was new?

Why would he when this place had humans?

He hadn't the imagination to build a human from scratch at the time, when he decided that no other shape would truly suffice, so he acquired one in the grand tradition of his people. (Looking back, it was a rather obscene tradition, but he had never been overly given to self-reflection. He rarely dwelt on the past.) 

He found a human that struck his fancy--a shape that called to his--and even he couldn't say why this one had. The gentleman using that perfect body had been in a very bad way when Jaskier had come upon him. He'd been savaged by some dreadful, _other_ beast, one of the creatures that had arrived with him when all the spheres crashed together. The creature had torn through the fellow's house, had smashed each human inside it to little shards and bits of themselves, and had devoured what bits it liked best. It was truly tragic the mess it had made, both of them and their lovely home, and Jaskier felt for him. 

He thought he did, at least.

He had offered the mortal a trade, as one does, and he felt he had been very generous with the terms of it. Hadn't tried to trick him, hadn't inserted a suspicious turn of phrase, hadn't even undercut him with a terrible curse when he presumed that he was allowed to negotiate. He'd been truly kind--which, even if the human didn't appreciate it, was very unusual for creatures like him. His people were not known for being overly giving...not on the whole, anyway. 

The sweet fellow, who had been delirious with pain and worry, had given his name over to Jaskier without a moment's hesitation. _Julian Alfred Pankratz._ He surrendered it happily, eagerly, on the condition that Jaskier wipe the tragedy of his loss from the fabric of everything. He'd phrased it differently, you know, around the blood and the choking. He'd asked him to fix it, to help them, to _make it not so_ \--that was all he wanted, the sum of everything that mattered in his heart. He had wanted his guilt, his inability to save his family, to be washed away and...in return he surrendered everything he was, had been, or would be.

It was an expensive request, truly. Reversing death was no small matter and reversing multiple deaths was even more so...but Jaskier was nothing if not a creature of his word. 

The compact was struck and Jaskier spent a truly impressive (if he did say so himself) amount of power undoing the damage Destiny had wrought upon this man and his house. He fixed the little humans first, of course. He brought all their bits back, snatched them from jaws that had hungered and from distant places, and had put them back together. He returned the vibrancy that they'd lost, relit their little flames, and shined their bright eyes until they'd gleamed once more. He restored their home, their lives, darned them back into their place in the fabric of all things, and then he'd been done. It had been a truly exhausting amount of work.

He'd been little more than a glimmer once he finished, nearly consumed for his efforts, but a deal was a deal and he had been bound to fulfill it. He would have tried even if it had snuffed him out in the attempt.

The sweet fellow had wept to see it, he had been weeping still when Jaskier took his payment and claimed Julian's body. The human had been drowning with joy, overcome by relief and love, and everything he felt swept over Jaskier like the tide. That swell of love and happiness, of gratitude and relief, was the first Jaskier ever knew of human emotions, of how powerful and awe inspiring they could be. His boundless curiosity and interest, his want and desire, were but idle distractions in the face of the unfathomable scope of human emotion--he'd become addicted instantly. 

From that first breath on, it became his mission to feel and see and experience everything a man could. He wasn't a man, not really, but that didn't mean he wasn't going to give the attempt his best try.

Julian had been a simple man from a simple family. That started Jaskier's journey out from a very interesting place--which was extremely agreeable given how he'd depleted himself restoring the lot of them to the flow of time. These humans were his blood, his family, and certainly, he had conflated their relationship with Julian for a relationship with him...but he had no reason to think they would love him differently than Julian. He had never had a family before, nor known love. The family had been his introduction to what it meant to be human and, oh, they were a delight. 

Largely.

The mother was cold in temperament and nearly shy in her reservation, she experienced the world a bare trickle at a time, and was all the more amazed for how little she consumed. Jaskier had observed her keenly, had watched as she savored the barest sips of joy and happiness and let herself sink back into the calm of ennui. The father was a resistant man, recalcitrant and restrictive of his own love--Jaskier had marveled at him, at how he fully experienced anger, at how his empathy was exclusive to gauging the experiences of others, to judging the value of their lives so that he could choose only the best for himself. He was discerning and hungry for feeling. It was all terribly interesting...though, the longer Jaskier spent in their presence, the more Julian's knowledge began to influence his interpretations. 

The remnants of Julian colored his experiences with these people, with all people, and it was some long time before Jaskier's experiences became wholly his own. At that time, with Julian's family, Jaskier felt like he was looking through a colored pane of glass. It cast every action, every sight and event in shades of Julian. It was less than ideal, true, but it did give him context for things he'd never known before. 

The mother, Jaskier realized, made his human heart sad and lonely. Those two feelings were worth savoring but, in the end, Jaskier found he didn't prefer them. The father made him afraid, and the human variant of fear was so interestingly different from the version he already knew. If it weren't almost painful to feel it, he would have spent an age examining it. The parents together inspired some other feeling--it gripped him when he faced them both at once, but it was an emotion Jaskier couldn't quite connect with. He attempted it, of course, but something in it was so removed that he could barely name it. Guilt? Remorse? Obligation? It was an uncomfortable feeling, one Julian shrank from, and he'd wallowed in it a while to get a taste for it. Eventually, he cast it aside and moved on, eager for something new and wondrous to take its place.

Truly, the best feelings he found in that family, were those that his sisters inspired. 

They were little humans, barely large enough to contain all the things they knew and felt and were driven express, and their joy became Jaskier's joy. Being in their presence was overwhelming in every way and Jaskier had been moved to dote upon them as he reveled in how precious they were. They made him generous--something he had already been given to, but oh, they had magnified it so very dramatically. He gave them gifts at every opportunity, without pause or restraint, and luxuriated in their reactions. At first, the gifts he gave were of the human sort. One received a bow, sparkling with color and light enough to dance in the breeze, and she had delighted in it when he plaited it into her soft curls. One was introduced to a little scruffy animal, soft and loyal, and the outpouring of love that she gave it was almost enough that Jaskier could see it in the air. Being near them, absorbing the light they gave off, was like sitting near a bonfire and warming his bones.

He didn't actually have bones, not apart from the ones he wore, but the simile was as close as human language could get.

Jaskier recovered within short years--a truly phenomenal feat by every other measure he'd ever known. He regained himself so quickly that, when the girls reached what humans considered majority, he was able to give them real gifts. 

And he did.

Juliette and Rosalind were their names. 

Juliette glittered in patches of starlight and had the fragile, timeless grace of bare branches in the deepest winter cold. When he asked her what she wanted, as though he might strike a compact, she had laughed and granted him a plume of her love. She told him she wanted for nothing, needed nothing but him. He'd pressed her, then, and that had been so very strange for him. He had never _insisted_ he be allowed to give a gift before, that was simply not how gifts were done, but she had loved Julian and, after him, Jaskier for all her life. He felt obliged to grant her some boon, some recompense for all the emotion she'd given freely.

"I want to be loved, truly, from now until the end of my days," she had told him. She had always been imprecise, a snowstorm made up of pinpoints of light and feeling, but Jaskier hadn't worried. He hadn't truly known how to, not then. He gave her what she wished for in the abundance she deserved and it cost him, but not nearly so much as restoring her had. Anyone who set eyes upon Juliette fell in love with her, utterly and completely, and their devotion knew no end. It would persist until the day she passed from this sphere. The man who wed her was royalty and he granted her every comfort, every mortal wish that she could want for, and she was truly adored. Juliette was beloved by one and all and it filled her with such happiness.

Rosalind was made of summer breeze and the rich laughter that echoed 'round a campfire. She was graceless and glorious, consuming in her passions and lit as brightly as the sun itself. Jaskier had learned _fun_ from her, had discovered the value of struggle when the end results proved promising. He asked what she wanted, just as he had asked Juliette, and Rosalind's answer had been the same as her sister. She wanted for nothing but him and her family, her life was her joy. She embraced him with all the strength in her arms and he had been suffused with her warmth. But he could hardly grant one sister a boon and give nothing to the other. Once again he insisted, begged her to tell him what she desired most, and she answered him.

"I want wonder. I want to see and do things that no one has ever seen or done before," she told him, her eyes full of fire and determination. She had a penchant for the dramatic, an attribute that had worn into him as surely as anything else, but she was not given to hyperbole. She had always been ambitious and he could deny her nothing, he knew that. He could have granted her sights beyond her ken, could have shown her himself, but that would not appease her. In the end, Jaskier gave her power, more power than any human had ever dreamed to hold. She became a living conduit of the space between the spheres. Chaos waited at her beck and call, begging to form whatever she would have it become, should she simply deign to call upon it. Her little, mortal flame had burned brightly for the sudden abundance of fuel.

But Destiny, Jaskier discovered, was a dreadful bitch. 

For all his kindnesses and the generosity of his gifts, Destiny found a way to turn them to tragedy. Juliette's beauty and love were corrupted by Destiny's machinations, she tangled up in the threads of fate, caught on the world around her, and she had hardly lived half a mortal life when she was stolen away from her husband. The King that took her from her home loved her truly, as everyone did, and he waged a terrible war with her husband. Rosalind, who had loved her long before Jaskier's gifts, sought her return with all the power she could conjure. The countryside had burned beneath Rosalind's hands, the sky was tainted, the seas swelled with blood and the broken bits of men, and Jaskier watched as the beauty of the world diminished.

Jaskier could do nothing to stop it, either the war or his sister--Destiny swept over them like the rising tide, swallowing and consuming all things, and when it receded...Juliette had perished beneath her lovers' blades and Rosalind had burned away what remained of herself, had let the chaos claim her. Jaskier could put humans back together, if he tried, if he was strong, but he couldn't undo this.

He learned about tragedy and loss, then, and decided he cared for neither. 

He left that house then, that family whose line he had resurrected, and wandered the world in search of something that might soothe the sting of Destiny's machinations--for something to distract him from the utter collapse of Julian's life.

It was Juliette's children that carried on the family name, that survived the chaos wrought upon the house of Pankratz. They grew and lived and died, their children did the same, and theirs after them before Jaskier had recovered from the loss of his dear sisters. He had loved them and, while he'd known they were mortal, that the very wonder of them was tied to that fact, the human heart was a thing that could not be reasoned with. Jaskier had never dealt with loss, with grief or sorrow, and the shades of it followed him for hundreds of years. He recovered as the world did and, in truth, he found some comfort in that.

When he returned to the lands of his family he found it changed. The horrors of the war, of all his bitter loss, had been wiped away by the hands of time. The razed earth was overgrown with forest, the fallen cities had been forgotten and lost to time. Their shapes vanished beneath new cities, new homes. The world was different and Jaskier found that he was no longer a resident here, he was a visitor to this place. Julian knew none of these places, none of their shapes and, finally, Jaskier was freed from the weight of Julian's gaze behind his own. He met the children that walked the land, the progeny of the family he had restored, and so many of them carried echoes of his sisters inside them. 

He doted upon them but, now, he was cautious. 

He gave gifts rarely and, when they were given, they were subtle. 

He granted one girl a fine gown and a night of freedom at a distant royal ball. Another, he restored to her former beauty after a dreadful accident, making her lovely as the first snow of winter. One boy was given a cloak that could not be cut, to protect him in battle. Another, he granted a sword whose glimmer would always lead his way. Each gift was well received, each gift aided the progeny of the Pankratz family, regardless of the names they had taken over time, and Jaskier was satisfied. Generations passed with nary a tragedy--his gifts were cherished, they were lost, the generations went on, and eventually they were forgotten. 

Destiny didn't intervene to stop him and so Jaskier carried on. He decided the world must have finally acclimated to his inhabiting this sphere--which, thank fuck for that. Caution was not in his nature, nor had it ever been in Julian's. If the world adjusted he could cease this ridiculous delicacy.

Oh, but then something truly amazing had happened.

One of his nieces summoned him.

She was a dear and darling thing, the very image of her ancestors, and he'd been flooded with awe as he beheld her, as he heard Rosalind in her and saw Juliette upon her face. She had called him with the name of the body he wore--how she had learned it, he hadn't the faintest--and he'd found himself in a circle of wildflowers. She had an offering for him, to soothe the slight of such an abrupt summoning: honeyed milk, a bottle of fine mead, and a snippet of poetry. They were made for him and he relished each of them to their fullest. They were more valuable than any mortal riches that she could have heaped at his feet. He did make her drink the honeyed milk as they spoke. She was such a small thing and looked hungry in a way he could never be.

She had a desperate need, she told him. She lived a happy life, had known little suffering, and while she was neither wealthy or titled, she had found a woman she truly loved. She told him about how she wished to marry her lady love, how her every thought was of her, and that she could not bear it if anything were to happen to her. She was but a minstrel and her lady love was the daughter of the miller. Her love's father--a man who was not of their blood and, thus, was of no interest to Jaskier whatsoever--had bragged of her love's skills too boldly and too loudly. With his lies, he had angered the King that ruled these lands. The King, in his fury, had demanded she demonstrate her skills at once and had locked her away so that she might do just that.

Her love had to weave straw into gold, a mountain of it in one night, else she would be executed and her father alongside her.

She had wept so bitterly, then, that Jaskier had felt a twinge of that old, terrible sorrow.

She promised him anything in exchange for his aid, offered anything he could want from her, anything she could give. She begged and bent and let her lovely forehead scrape the ground in her desperate pleading.

He couldn't refuse her, in the end, but hers was an expensive request. He could see how the tapestry of time would need to be mended to grant her desires and Destiny, he knew, would not have allowed her to have her love and keep her at once. Sweet girl, he warned her, if he spared her love's life, she would not be able to remain at her side. She agreed, desperate and heartbroken in equal measure. Her love's life was enough, if he would save it, she would be happy. She offered to pay for his help with her most precious possession. She gave Jaskier the lute that she played for her lady love, the instrument that held so many nights of tender sweetness and the fond whispers of young love, and the compact was struck. 

She'd wept with overwhelming joy, that same sort that Julian had known when Jaskier had fulfilled that first compact, and-- _oh_ \--the feeling was welcome as it washed over him. He returned her embrace and, that very night, appeared to the girl that his blood had traded her prize possession for. 

She was a pretty thing, lovely and guileless, and she had a terrible fright when he appeared in her tower beside her. He hushed her, bid her sleep, and played a sweet song on that lute to usher her into dreams. While she slept, Jaskier completed her task for her, spinning the piles of straw into impossibly delicate gold thread. The whole of the room was reduced to a single spindle of perfect shimmering sylph by dawn. He left the spool in her hand and vanished with the rising of the sun.

He had thought the problem solved but his blood summoned him again, that very day, tears falling from her eyes and voice broken in desperation. The King had been amazed, she told him, but he had thought, perhaps, the spinning was a trick. He thought she had somehow acquired that thread and had burnt the straw away in the night. If she could not weave again, her lady love would die and their village would be razed. Jaskier comforted her as she wept and she offered him her songs, her voice and her words, if only he would help. If only he would save her life, for that was more dear to her than all the songs and all the words in all the world.

He was concerned then, for that was a dear price to pay, but the threads of Destiny had not yet snagged on his interference. He accepted but, this time, he left her with her voice and her words until he had saved her love from the coming dawn.

Once again he met the pretty girl in the tower and she wept with joy to see him. She begged him for his aid and he strummed her to sleep once more--he had already been paid and he was many things, fickle and strange, but he had never claimed payment twice. It was not the way of compacts. 

The King had doubled the amount of straw in the tower; it covered the floor and rose to the rafters high above. The girl slept on the stone floor behind him and Jaskier spun the whole of it. Each stray piece and fleck of straw joined together. They wound through his fingers and were transmuted on the creaking wooden wheel beneath him. The straw became something less enchanting than what it was, than what it had been, and he lamented the loss quietly as he worked. He stripped each blade of their smell, of the sound that they made, of the texture that spoke of what they had been before, and turned them from something that was part of this world, something that had once lived, into something that was not. Into something that had never lived, nor would ever live again.

Dawn rose and Jaskier left two spindles of golden sylph in the girl's hands. 

When the sun was at its highest, his blood came to the circle of wildflowers and found him there, seated and waiting. He hadn't known she would return, had hoped that she would not, and was sad when he saw her. He had to claim his payment, such was the way of compacts, but before he did, she begged him one final favor. The King demanded that her love weave the thread into cloth, to prove that it was real and not a conjurer's trick, and if she succeeded the King planned to wed her. If she failed, he would take her head and demand the whole of the kingdom watch as it was done.

The girl grieved as she looked to him and Jaskier embraced her despite the biting depth of her sorrow. She begged him to save her, to see to it that she lived, and Jaskier reminded her that her request would come at a cost...and that he could not spare her love from the King's attention. Destiny was already starting to deform around his works and he knew, all too well, what would happen if he incited Destiny's wrath. He dare not do something drastic and watch everything burn down around them. 

She offered Jaskier her love. 

She begged him to take it, the whole of it, and spare her the suffering that it had brought her. He agreed. He took her love from her, her adoration, her songs, and her voice, and left her alongside the ring of wildflowers. With her love went her grief, but so too went her joy, and he was made bitter by that knowledge. The girl, whom he now loved as dearly as his own life, sat at the loom with thread in hand and waited for him to appear. Her eyes were bright with excitement, her cheeks rosy and flushed, and she was so eager to have him help her that she nearly leapt into his arms. Hope danced on her pretty face and he felt as if that glimmer of feeling had cleaved his heart in two. She told him that he had made her wish come true, that he was a blessed thing, and she begged him to help her. 

Oh, the ache of his heart, then, as he felt for his blood. He loved his niece as he did his sisters, adored her without hesitation. She had given up everything for this girl, every part of herself had been bitterly spent...for a woman who had not even spoken her name to Jaskier. He felt the sting of her indifference in the love he'd been given. That sting was a wound, one that festered and raged inside him. He had learned bitterness already and that bitterness made him greedy. Driven by spite, he claimed a price from that girl. He agreed to help her, yes, but only upon the condition that her first born child would be his. He had no need of a baby, of course, nor any want to watch one that was not his blood grow...but she had taken so much joy and love, it seemed only fair to take hers in kind. 

_That_ was the nature of his people.

The girl agreed without hesitation, without reservation, and the compact was struck. 

He felt Destiny snag, then, but the hurt in his heart hid the damage from him. He knew it was there, of course, but it would not be immediate. He could work to mitigate it. 

Jaskier bid her to sleep with the songs he had been paid, had watched as she recognized them and fell away into dreams, a sad look on her pretty face. 

The cloth he wove that night was of such staggering beauty that it evoked the very fabric that separated the spheres. It reflected light that mortal men could not behold, shone and fluttered with the shifting currents of chaos, and weighed naught at all. When he was done, he draped that fabric atop the girl--Marta was her name, he knew--and smashed both the spinning wheel and the loom to splinters. He left long before the breaking of dawn and was never again summoned to that circle of wildflowers.

He lamented the loss his niece suffered, of the life she might've had, and he spent five long years playing her lute and singing the songs of her love. Those who heard him were moved by the emotion in his voice, by the sweetness of his cadence, and the movement of the strings beneath his fingers. They gave him sympathy and tried to assuage his woes--this he had not expected. Just as his sisters had poured out their love and joy into him, as they had fed him with the breadth of what their human hearts could conjure, so too did these people give him pieces of themselves. They gave him merriment and laughter, sorrow and sighs, longing and adoration--all in exchange for a song.

It was so easy, so entrancing, and so ephemeral--he need not strike a compact, nor forge a deal, to get what he needed from mortal men. He need only sing sweetly and play well and they granted him power enough to recover, to grow, and to thrive. He was enthralled by the process, by the very nature of it, so much so that he forgot to temper the snag in the fabric of Destiny. He had ignored Marta and the movements of the world--he might've even forgotten about her entirely, but he felt the pull of her child.

A compact had been struck and he had to claim payment.

Jaskier returned to those lands by foot, drawn through valley and forest by the pull of the compact. He crossed the continent as men did, playing and singing for any mortal who struck his fancy, until he found himself in the city of Cidaris. The blue and gold banners fluttered overhead, the ocean extended out beyond, and Jaskier's mood soured as he recalled the many tragedies of the long past. He had not been in a kind or giving mood, revenge had primacy in his thoughts, but he had not intended to be cruel until he stepped foot in Cidaris. The pain of his niece's love lingered still, the sting of Marta's joy had never healed beneath his inexperienced hands--and the sentiments that lingered in the sounds of crashing waves and the metallic clank of armor...they drove him to thoughts and desires that were opposed to his very nature.

He had never understood the drive for cruelty, it had always been beyond him...but recalling what Marta had done, what he'd been forced to take from his own blood...from the last blood he had given their heart's wish...oh that confluence helped him understand. He was lesser for it but, at once, could not bring himself to care.

He arrived at the castle gates as the sun set and found a great crowd of had gathered before them. There was a party to be had this night, in celebration of the Prince's first name-day, and the people had arrived to catch the very barest scraps of enchantment and wonder that spilled from the windows and balconies of the castle. King Gardik had invited guests from across the whole of the world, from the farthest corners of the continent, and they had joyfully attended. The city had been festooned with decorations, with flowers, streamers, and ribbons that fluttered in the breeze. Lanterns glittered at every corner and joy threatened to wash the whole of the city into the sea.

Oh, how he would have reveled in this feeling, in this place...if only it hadn't been paid for in his own blood.

Jaskier entered the castle with ease, welcomed as one of the staff, and was ushered through chambers and doorways until he reached the great hall. The guests that filled the hall were clad in the finest fabrics, decorated with gems and furs and glittering accents. They shone beneath the myriad of candles in a thousand shades of color, refracting like nothing he'd ever witnessed in this sphere. The polished floors shone with the echoes of them all, gleaming and brilliant, sweeping to and fro as they danced and glided to the music. The tables were laden with all manner of food--stacked higher than he had ever witnessed. The excess was beyond what Jaskier had ever imagined this world to hold, a testament to the joys that Destiny had granted Marta, and Jaskier felt painful, bitter cruelty curl in his chest.

At once, he wanted to take this from them, he wanted to stretch across all of it and claim it as his own, to savor the mood, the touch, the taste of this place until no emotion or color could be wrung from any of it. He wanted to live a thousand lifetimes in this room, dancing and delighting, loving and living, singing and strumming until there were no songs left to play, until the walls wore away and crumbled around them. He wanted to welcome the wanting into this place, to share it with all those of his blood that walked this world...but none of it was his to take. 

Well...nearly none of it.

The compact drew him through the palace as surely as it had drawn him over the lands of Temeria. 

He felt the pull of it like an anchor and he was helpless to fight it...and, in truth, he wasn't even inclined to play at resistance.

The King and Queen sat at the end of the hall, raised up on a marble dais with grand windows of colored glass behind them. They laughed and spoke and he could taste their joy from across the hall--their son rested in Marta's arms, fussing angrily. It could feel him, he expected, and Jaskier felt a twinge of pity for the boy. He could have waited, he supposed, and granted them the memory of this night...but this woman had taught him cruelty, had taught him vindictiveness, and he was consumed by both as he looked upon them.

Jaskier strummed his lute as he stepped out onto the ballroom floor. The music that hung heavy in the air fell flat, the other musician's notes twisted and twanged, struggled, failed, and were snuffed out entirely as he plucked the strings of his niece's lute. The people who spun and twirled over the marble floor moved aside, were driven back by the shape of him and the air that bent the space around him. They were each of them made duller by his passing, fading to pale echoes as he drew the joy and the color from their night. A chill took the room as he walked and, by the time he reached the center of the hall, frost crept over those fine, colored windows behind the dais. The sound of the ocean beyond the castle walls was like thunder crashing in the distance. 

Marta knew him, she had not forgotten his face, and she clutched her son to her chest as he approached. The terror that consumed her was another new flavor, unique from what he knew, and it poured into the air choking and black. Despite his anger, his desire to be cruel, the taste of that terror turned his satisfaction to ash in his mouth. He had to still his fingers as it moved, had to slow the strum of music as it began to infect those in the hall, lest his finger slip and play a sour note. They stared at him and the joy he drew became consuming fear, hardened and curdled into the very edge of a scream, and he learned what it was to feel ill. He strummed the lute and the flames across the hall flickered and dimmed. They twisted with the terror of the room, danced in blue and black, and Jaskier was distracted.

He couldn't feel how Destiny's tangle evened out, how it meant to fold back and cover the damage he had caused, but it did. It had already.

In all the years that he'd spent wearing a human body, in more than a millennium of wandering the world, Jaskier had never actually come to harm. The very thought that something could progress to that point, that he could be hurt by a mortal creature, had never even occurred to him. When the bolt struck his shoulder, he twisted like a leaf in the winter breeze. He tumbled, stumbled, and the crowd retreated from him gasping in fright. Pain--real and tangible pain had only ever been a memory before this, a vestige of Julian's that lingered in the distant reaches of what he'd become. He didn't like it and, despite how quiet the human had fallen in recent centuries, Julian began to panic. That emotion paired with the fear in the air and Jaskier felt it wash across him.

He moved to stand, the whole of his attention on the wooden bolt in his shoulder. His hand left the strings of his lute and reached for it but, well before he could even touch it, he was caught across the face with a sharp blow. Julian's vision jarred as he was knocked down, as he was sent to the floor and put on his back. Jaskier set Julian's eyes aside, ignored the roll of nausea that moved through him, and looked up--a man in black stood above him, haloed in the wisps of blue and black flame that danced above the room. His yellow eyes were piercing and terrible--he was human, but he stank like the other beasts--and they stared back at Jaskier's without fear. Julian's face burned--and, as he recognized the sensation, so did Jaskier's. 

The weapons this man used were made of something strange, something Jaskier had never bothered to encounter, and he hated it. Oh--that he could feel hate--who had granted him that? He stood and his eyes tracked the room--the terror redoubled and he wondered, for that moment, what his eyes looked like when they sat in Julian's face. It would remain a mystery, he realized, as the man in black came at him again. He had a sword drawn, held aloft in one hand, and magic curled around his other. The spell glittered in simple, half-visible threads of crimson-gold, and Jaskier watched as he charged. He threw that tangle of threads at him, some burst of power and spellwork that stank of flame, and Jaskier knocked it aside. It burst behind him, gold and crimson, and he could nearly feel the heat of it.

Marta shrieked at his back and Jaskier looked, then--caught sight of her long enough to see that the spell had exploded across their table. The flames had burst across her and the babe in her arms, had set both alight. Julian paled as he watched them burn, as the King and his guard struggled to put her out, and Jaskier hesitated. He had come to claim the child--he loved and hated Marta--the fire was magical and Jaskier's touch had bent it out of shape, had made it crueler than it was meant to be. It burned higher as they fought to quell it--

Jaskier screamed in time with Julian as the man in black drove his sword through Julian's stomach. The blade burned and hissed as it plunged through him. Jaskier struggled against it, clawed at it, but it burnt Julian's hands whenever they grazed it. He was frantic, caught up in Marta's agony and panic, and the man in black drove him back against one of the long tables. His sword plunged into the wood, pinned Jaskier to it, and his world swam as he was struck with a closed fist. It bit into Julian's face and the metal wrapped into that strike seared him.

He felt the very moment Marta's compact was paid.

The babe died, burnt to death in his mother's arms, and Julian's face contorted with Jaskier's regret. His nausea persisted, couched in all manner of pain, and he saw no way to dispel either. The sword was wrenched from his gut and he felt a frigid, terrible lurch as Marta's heart stopped. Julian fell to his knees and Jaskier gasped--he had failed in his compact with his niece. He had taken payment and let her love perish--had allowed her foremost condition to lapse. The payment she granted him was stripped from him as Marta's last breath left her. 

This had never happened before--he had never seen a compact broken--had never known of one that was--not on this sphere or any other. 

The man in black cut into him with that sword--his blows splintered the lute, pared whole swaths of Julian's flesh, scalded Jaskier himself, but the pain that left him frozen and gaping on that marble floor was not something as simple as the wounds of flesh and bone. Jaskier shivered and convulsed as pieces of himself were carved out of himself, as things that he had absorbed, that he had integrated into what he was, were ripped from him. He felt his adoration evaporate--earnest infatuation was stripped away from him, torn out of every memory and thought, and he could do little more than whimper. Each song was taken, each note faded, and each beautiful melody extinguished into nothingness, lost beyond the edge of all things. He wept as the abiding love of his niece began to crumble inside him--he reached for it, for the knowledge of true romantic love, but his grasping fingers found no purchase. It fled him, poured through his hands like sand, and all he was left with were the holes. He had been gouged apart and was littered with hollows and voids, drowning in a sea of ambient terror and rage.

He gasped and his throat caught around it--a sob of that old sorrow, of new and hideous loss, tore from him--and Julian's voice broke around it.

Jaskier wept as he looked up at the man in black. Julian had been hacked near to pieces, carved up so utterly that the shape of Jaskier within him shone through the great rends and gaps in his flesh. The light he shed on this world was shifting and watery, it was light never meant for mortal eyes, and it entranced the people that surrounded him. It would drive them to madness, it had done as much to so many mortal creatures when he first came to this sphere...but not the man before him. That man stared at him with fury and contempt, his gold eyes lit from within, and Jaskier had to struggle to find words again. His niece's had been so lovely, so perfect, but they were lost to him now. He had only Julian's left and he had not used those in long years.

"What are you?" He asked, begged with Julian's agony tangled into his voice. That made the man in black stumble, made him recoil and broke his expression apart. Jaskier had never tasted that feeling, nor seen that face, and he did not know what they meant. Neither had been given to him and he lacked the strength to take either.

"A...Witcher," the man answered and watched as Jaskier's eyes wept bitter black tears down Julian's rent and twisted face. The Witcher steeled himself as he stared into those immortal, impossible eyes. He swallowed around his emotion and asked: "What are you?" 

Jaskier had no words for this and, truly, Julian hadn't either. Jaskier was not of words, not precisely, and this sphere lacked anything to compare himself to. He couldn't lie, not even as he wore this shape, and so he gaped a moment as he searched for an answer.

There was a term he had heard just once, a word from so very long ago that it had died with the first tribes of humans. They had called him by it when he first observed them. They spent it on him and, despite the brevity of the encounter, he was granted its meaning. It described something that had been touched by the chaos, that it was made strange and given curious, wonderful, and dangerous power. It had been separate from a curse, from a spell, had not carried intent or meaning...but described an accident. It had been used to speak about things from other spheres, other beasts or their boons, to explain some strange aspect that was beyond explaining.

Jaskier did not know if it was still used, if it held any meaning whatsoever or if it was nonsense:

" _Fae_ ," he answered, for he had no other answer to give. "I am _faerie_."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have you ever had an idea stick in your mind and refuse to dislodge itself until it was written? This was that, for me, and it was getting in the way of the other fic I wanted to work on. So, please enjoy this curious AU that will be updated sporadically when it refuses to leave me be.
> 
> Based extremely loosely on an old tumblr post that I can no longer locate. 
> 
> To paraphrase: What if a Barbarian/Warrior accidentally became a Warlock because a delicate little celestial/deity has fallen head over heels for them and keeps granting them boons and favors to they don't die.


	2. Sweetling

The pain of failure, of breaking a compact, haunted him for years after Marta and her babe had passed.

Days, weeks, months crawled by and stole the shape of his niece's face from him, the contents of her songs, and the very memory of the talent she'd bestowed on him. Jaskier had been left with nothing but the chasm those things had left behind to remember them by. Those holes and hollows pained him far more than the Witcher's wounds had pained Julian--they lingered, ached, and his thoughts broke upon them like the shore. He'd been able to restore Julian's bits and pieces, to make him hale and whole once again, but he couldn't do the same with himself. The wounds from that failed compact lingered and he was lost, unable to remember what had been taken, or to seek it out so that it might be replaced. The pain provided him a host of uncomfortable, dreary experiences to marvel at. He learned new shades of pain and loss, mulled them over, and he finally began to comprehend the mortal propensity for regret.

It was a truly vexing emotion for him, one that he wanted to indulge in but was unable to fully succumb to. Jaskier was not much for caution or restraint, he was a creature of pure and unfiltered emotion, but even he could see what the consequences of indulging in regret would be. Unlike the mortal races around him, unlike all but a scattered few _other_ beasts, he actually had the ability to reshape this sphere to his liking. Unfortunately, he lacked the power to truly undo the ruin Destiny had made of the world around him. He knew that he would perish in the attempt, if he began, and so he hadn't entertained regret for more than a moment at a time.

Best not court the disaster if he could avoid it, yes?

Eventually, as he wandered the continent in a pained, miserable daze, Jaskier found a shade of regret that he could entertain.

The kingdom of Cidaris fell apart after that fateful ball, collapsed as their King succumbed to grief, and was parted out to the countries at their borders. They were carved apart as surely as Julian had been and, across the whole of the world, he watched as city and kingdom, countries and courts, fell into chaos as the nobility went mad from the memory of him. The world had not caught alight, not as it had when he'd lost his beloved sisters, but it smoldered in an ungainly way that made mortal men wary and inspired them to long for times when things were not quite so perilous.

The shape of longing was familiar, he had known it intimately before he had lost his blood's adoration, but the way men combined longing with regret was curious and new. Each emotion alone was unpleasant, sad and dull, fraught with temptation and bitterness...but together they harmonized and changed to something fragile and beautiful. _Nostalgia_ he learned from a woman in, then, Cintra. She had desired a pleasure she'd lost when Cidaris collapsed, a type of jam that had fallen out of favor with the locals as the borders shifted, and it had been a simple enough exchange that Jaskier offered it without spoken terms. He granted her the item she sought and drank in the shape of her fond, bittersweet reminiscing.

He could see the appeal in nostalgia and, for all the terrible (and middling) suffering that followed that ball, he found some respite in grasping to reclaim the past. It did not occur to him that, of all creatures, he was far too powerful to salve his heart with nostalgia.

Jaskier conjured a lute that looked just as his niece's had, that matched it bit for bit, flaw for flaw, but it felt like a stranger under his fingers. He strummed it and it sounded foreign, unfamiliar in a way he couldn't describe. He knew it couldn't ever sound the same as hers--hers had been alive, it had carried the weight of everything that came before it and everything it had done. Jaskier's? He had spun it from nothing and, to his dismay, it sounded of nothing. Still, he tried to recapture the delight and merriment of the years he had wandered and played, to reclaim the pieces he had lost. He played his lute with as much skill as his blood had ever employed, with fingers that could dance across the threads of fate and make them sing as he wove and unwound them. He played fast, slow, in impressive arcs and simple harmonies, but it all sounded like distant, hollow echoes. His music was little more than a pale imitation of the music she made. The words he wrote were lackluster, uninspiring, and were forgotten as quickly as they were heard. 

At times, when his mood was bleakest, he truly exerted himself into his act. He tried, with desperate abandon to recapture the hearts of men, and failed utterly every time. All he earned with his music, his phantom pantomime, was their ire and vitriol.

For a time, it was enough.

He wallowed in the sting of failure, in the fond and bittersweet memory of what had been, and accepted the blackened scraps of emotion that the world saw fit to grace him with. It did nothing to restore his power, to replenish what he'd spent when he repaired the body he wore, but it maintained him. Where his sisters had been a bonfire, the attentions of the audiences he sang to were a guttering candle in the dark. The warmth they granted him was meager, the light was bare and dim, but it was something.

It was something.

Destiny rippled around his broken compact, fractured in ways that reflected the holes that still cut through him, and he was made skittish. He gave nothing to anyone, blood or otherwise. He made no compacts, struck no deals, and granted no gifts, mortal or otherwise, to anyone that walked the world. It was a miserable, miserly way to live. This sphere had lost so much color, so much allure on that cursed night that Jaskier, in all his meandering and sadness, hardly noticed the passage of a century. He might've carried on, roaming along the edges of human tolerance, until the earth rotted away beneath his feet. He certainly had a mind to try...but then, somehow, he was summoned. 

Jaskier found himself in a dark place, in a tower that hummed with the empty spaces beneath it, with the voids that curled inside, waiting to be filled by the swells and crashing waves of chaos. The air twisted, here, danced with potential and wonder and, for just a moment, he mistook it for another place in another sphere, somewhere far away and perched upon a time that no longer existed. He stood in the center of a ring of chalk--white drawn in careful sweeping symbols and lines across a dark slate floor. He didn't know the symbols, nor the purpose of the arcs, but it didn't take much to guess at what they were meant to do. They glittered at the edge of his vision, right where Julian could see them, and drew faint, delicate barriers into the space around him.

They were meant to bind him?

It was a strange idea but, more than anything, it was _new_.

He was so weary, so dismally tired, that his heart and soul clutched at those lines and the meager wonder they inspired in him. It was something that he had never seen, never known before, and it managed to tug at his long-dormant curiosity. He wondered at the floor, at the shimmering barriers, and at the flavor of potential in the air.

"Oh, and where is this?" he mused, his dull voice reclaiming a note of music as he woke from his daze. He turned in place, eyes dancing over the corners and hollows where darkness fell heaviest. The weight of ten thousand lives rested in the walls of this place, slotted into the old stone and the spaces between, and he drew a deep breath to clear the ennui that had gripped him for a hundred years.

"Aretuza," a voice answered him, gave that knowledge freely, and his curious gaze drifted until it found them. "The Tower of the Gull." 

The girl on the floor had dark hair and the relentless air of the high summer sun about her. Her body was twisted, unusual, but built in the shades of two spheres--she was new, she was strange, and he peered at her with undisguised interest. It discomfited her to be observed with such focus, such intent, he saw, but she bore the brunt of his scrutiny for the duration. When he grew tired of staring at her--for she was curious but no part of her was his blood--he turned his attention to the lute in his hands. The tune of it resounded in empty, forgettable notes as he strummed it. They didn't even echo when they met the walls of this small, vacant space.

It made him sad and he sighed, resigned and eager for any distraction.

"I don't suppose you knew to prepare any tributes?" Jaskier asked and fussed with the tuning of his lute, as if its flaws could be corrected by something so simple as tensing a string. Worry spiked through her, childish and immediate, and he strummed the strings once more. Their sound drifted and fell away within the distance of a breath or two. Its failures weighed on him and he took pity on the girl as she tried to build some excuse or offer to appease him. "That's alright, I have not been summoned in so long...I didn't think anyone still knew how. Give me a gift and I will consider the slight paid."

"What gift do you want?" she asked, suddenly and rightfully wary of him. She rose from the floor and her eyes, bright and brilliant, fixed him with a hard, attentive stare.

It was clever of her, even if it was an accident, and it brought a twinge of joy to him. It shone on his face, turned Julian's lips into a wry sort of smile, and he banished his lute back to the nothingness it had been spun from. She watched him bravely, carefully, and waited for him to answer her question before asking the next. She knew about the price of words, knew the cost of dealing with him--and that was strange, wasn't it? He could ask her how she knew, discover what relic had survived the long years, what still bore his body's name, but he found that he didn't really care about that. 

She wasn't his blood but the shape of her, of the emotion and ambition that lingered inside her, reminded him of his beloved Rosalind. He could have nothing of Rosalind returned, it was beyond him at his very best, but this girl might grant him a facsimile. Something real, something he had not ruined or woven from emptiness.

"A lock of your hair," he requested and watched the thoughts race across her eyes. She worried what he would do, why he wanted it, what horror could be wrought with such a thing...he nearly told her the truth of it...but he decided not to in the end. He was generous by nature and he knew, now, that it was a deadly flaw. His generosity had only ever earned him the most dreadful and grave wounds. He would be selfish with her, with everyone in this sphere, and perhaps that would guard his human heart from any more lingering pains. 

She didn't ask why he wanted it, why he needed it, because questions were expensive things--no, she made her decision, charged forward and drew a fist-full of dark hair from behind her neck. She cut the hair free and offered it to him in an outstretched, open hand. A gift offered openly.

Jaskier stepped forward and watched the fear flare on her face--it was only a moment or two before it bled from her and filled in the space around them. He crossed the barriers she had drawn around him as easily as skipping a step when taking a flight of stairs. In a moment he stood before her, well outside the bounds she had built to constrict him, and offered her a sad and, if he were honest, fond smile as he took the loose hair from her outstretched hand. To her credit, she didn't so much as flinch away from him. She only lowered her hand once he had claimed his gift.

"My thanks," Jaskier said and his fingers worked through the strands as he idly plaited them together into a fine braid. "Now, I cannot help but wonder why I am called to Aretuza, the Tower of the Gull? By someone who did not know they needed tribute to appease me?"

She stood firm, her chin held as high as her spine would allow, and Jaskier watched her with that same distant fondness. Her hands clenched at her sides and she ignored the spell-work behind him, moved forward, and demanded what she wanted of him:

"The old lore claims that you are bound in service to the one who calls you by name," she stated and it very clearly was not a question. Jaskier listened and his smile spread, just so, as he did. "I have called you here by name. I demand your service."

"Do you?" he asked and felt the old delight, the old pride and wonder bubbling inside him. "And what is my name, sweetling?"

Oh, how she bristled at that name. Her cheeks flushed with fury and shame and she glowered at him, dared him to judge her, and he would never.

"Julian Alfred Pankratz," she said, pronounced it like a spell, and he felt the pull those words as they levered against the body he wore. He felt the floor behind him flare with her power, with the spell she wove, and surprise washed over him. She had tried to bind his body to the circle--oh, what a dear, clever girl--he laughed and she shot him a look of such venom he was shocked he didn't burst into flame that very instant.

"You were right," he assured her and toyed with the braid in his hands. It took very little to tie it round his wrist and he did so, absently, as he spoke. "I am bound in service, the very heart of my being surrendered to any creature who summons me, who calls me by my name." His sigh was not calming and her frustration, oh he adored it, he desperately wished she would grant him a sliver of it. If he read her correctly, she was far more likely to stab him than grant him another boon and that, he felt, was fair. "Unfortunately, sweetling, while I can be called to you with that name, it is not mine."

Her face fell at once. Her confidence dropped away and she paled as fear and the sinking pull of failure warred for primacy in her heart. He did not embrace her, she was not his blood, but his face was not unkind as he watched her.

"That's why the binding--" she whispered and he inclined his head, granting her that answer without cost. He had no idea if a binding with his real name would be more effective and, frankly, he was not inclined to trade her something of such value. Her eyes took on a manic sort of fury, a fire that spoke of her desire to fight, to defend herself and conquer the threats that rose to meet her. She would fight him, he realized, and his smile all but split his face as he beheld her in all her boundless ferocity.

"They say that you bring madness and winter, that you consume babes and mothers, Kings and Queens, bathing them in cold flames if they slight you. The tales say you brought Old Cidaris to ruin because you had not been invited to the royal name-day," she told him, her voice sharp and combative. For the first time in a century, he thought back to that ball and tried to recall the whole of it. Her account was strange and he was curious to hear more, but she gave him no room to question her. "They also say you can grant gifts in exchange for the souls of men and elves."

At that, he finally let out a laugh. It was an echo of an older, more jovial time, but it rang true. He offended her, he could feel it in the anger that lined her form, but he could not bite back the smile that split his face.

"I have no interest in the souls of men and elves," he assured her, but he did not bother to explain Cidaris, nor the ball that led to its ruin. "The other half is true, for all that it can be. I can and will grant your heart's desire, but the cost will be dear and inevitable. Speak what you want, sweetling, and I shall tell you the price of it."

"My name is not _sweetling_ , demon," she seethed and he tilted his head as he looked at her.

"Demon?" Jaskier asked, delight and fascination warring on his face. She eyed him and a shrewd sort of tension darted across the line of her brow. "Tell me, dear girl, where did you hear that I was a demon?" 

Technically, he supposed it was true. Humans had decided, nigh a thousand years ago, that anything of another sphere, anything summoned that lived beyond their ken, were demons. He was not the same as the others, the elementals, the shapes, the others, that took that name. He could not use it, it was too vague, but that did not mean she couldn't call him whatever she liked. He demanded a boon of her, an answer, and she crafted her reply cleverly.

"Tell me your name and I will tell you theirs," she offered, lightly, in an easy voice. He was so startled that he choked on the laugh she surprised out of him. It maintained despite his sputtering, shaking Julian's chest as he denied her.

"Oh, what a grand expense! How cleverly you negotiate...but, no, I shall simply have to languish in my ignorance," Jaskier demurred and she looked terribly irritated with him. "Make your request, sweetling, and I will name the price."

She scowled at him, open and furious, but didn't correct him again as he spoke. She debated, if only for a few moments, and he felt a mixed emotion bubble up her throat. She was furious with him, disgusted by this whole turn of events, and determined to charge ahead and claim some measure of the success she had taken aim at. Her emotion rolled with in her, boiling and hardening into something hard and sharp.

"The mages of Aretuza are the most powerful in the world. The sorceresses trained here advise every court on the continent; they shape history and maintain the balance of power across the realms of men," she told him and he listened. For all that he knew, for all the years he lived, he was a poor scholar. Until he had arrived in this dreary place, he had never heard the name of Aretuza. Fortunately, lies had no value with him, and he didn't suspect she had even imagined lying as she demanded her boon. "But that is a pathetic end--to learn how to manipulate the fabric of all things and, what? Spend a dozen lifetimes trying to convince a royal fool to entertain your advice? It is a waste, of potential, of time, of effort for something as fleeting and foolish as power--not even real power, but being adjacent to a throne."

Jaskier's smile dampened as she spoke, as she ranted and the flame that drove her rose and built with her anger. He had no opinion on nobility, on the stations of men, or the conflicts of mortal creatures, so he could not speak to whether it was pathetic or not. He had not witnessed a marked uptick in stability during his wandering, but he had also largely ignored the machinations of the mortal world. Her line of thought, however unusual, drifted perilously close to the gift he'd given the woman she reminded him of. His hesitance must have shown on his face because her frustration spiked as he spoke. 

"So you want me to grant you power?" he asked, tone careful, and was taken aback when she growled at him.

"What, so that I always know that my power was a _gift_ , that I owe everything I am to some demon I summoned to a dank basement in Aretuza? Not hardly," she snapped and Jaskier was confused.

"Then what _do_ you want from me?" Jaskier asked, his curiosity overtaking his hesitance and the age-old aching of his heart.

"I wanted to know that I could summon you, that I could hold you, that I had magic and power no one in Aretuza had ever attempted to claim," she explained, vehement and angry. She had failed in all but the first of her goals and, to his dismay, it didn't take much to glean what she wanted.

"So you want dominion over me?"

"No, I don't have any desire to keep a demon on a chain. That is no better than owing you my power. What I want, _what I will bargain for_ , is your favor."

Once again, she took him by surprise. 

She refused to request his name, refused to request commensurate power, refused to name a request. What she wanted was...a vague, potential twist of fate. She wanted an open-ended favor, something that was impossibly dangerous to request, and nearly too much for him to agree to. He looked at her, wariness taking his expression, and she held his gaze. He was driven to accept, just as mortal creatures were driven by hunger, but he hesitated.

"I am powerful, sweetling, but there are limits to what I can do. If I agree to your terms, to give you one request without restriction, you may find yourself with nothing at the end, not even satisfaction. Do you understand?"

"Yes." She nodded and, truly, he believed that she did. The look in her eyes was hard and certain.

"Then you shall not be startled by the price that must be paid?"

"I won't."

"Very well," Jaskier replied and reached out to take her hand. His fingers closed over hers and, at once, they stood on a hill in a very distant place. He knew it, though the topography had shifted quite a lot over the decades--it was the site of his house, of Julian's home. The girl at his side was alarmed but she didn't yank her hand free from his grip.

"I have offered a gift like the one you desire only once before. It was given here, to Julian Alfred Pankratz," he explained and with some great effort was able to share what he saw. The shades of the past converged with the present and the destruction of the house of Pankratz rippled into being around them. Her horror was black and cloying but it didn't consume her. She stared at the bodies, the devastation, and truly absorbed what she saw--Jaskier still had trouble managing that, even with all his years wandering in Julian's body. 

"This was the most difficult exchange I have ever made. I restored these people, wove them into the world again--"

"And the price."

"Julian." Jaskier took a deep breath and released her hand. At once they were returned to the dank basement of Aretuza. The shadows of the past evaporated like mist and memory, ephemeral and insubstantial in the face of...well...everything real around them. His look was longing, he could feel it, and he did nothing to curb it as he regarded the girl. "I have worn him for thirteen hundred years and, so long as I do, pieces of him will remain tangled in the fabric of this sphere."

"You want my body?" she asked waspishly and banished his melancholia.

"No, no," he assured her, a smile curling on Julian's face. She took it poorly, was offended by his slight against her form, his laughter, but he carried forward: "I prefer a somewhat...different configuration."

She bristled, her mood held tight but lined with her suspicion and anger. She thought he was mocking her. Perhaps he was, he couldn't tell any longer.

"I am not of this world, sweetling. I am weak and I am wanting and Destiny has stripped me of so many things that I cherished. I cannot replace them, nor begin to create anew. I have lost the beauty that inspired me to bind myself to this sphere and, if I am to spend myself to nothingness, I demand that the span between now and my end be given life. Honest, earnest life."

"I don't understand," she admitted, tentatively, and Jaskier folded his arms across Julian's chest.

"I cannot create, sweetling, not anything that is real or alive. I have never been alive, not like you are, and so nothing I weave will ever be more than what it is made from. Often, the end result is far less. Julian has passed and is little more than flesh to be worn, he cannot create any more than I." He was being generous by telling her all of this, by making these grand admissions, but the cost of this exchange was too high to operate without candor. He had forgotten adoration, love, and all the tender words that inspired the hearts of men. He had not forgotten the black and putrid taste of fear--he tasted it now as he thought on the possibility of his own end. "In exchange for your boon, I require your ability to create life anew."

She stared at him, violet eyes hard with consideration, and inclined her head. The compact was struck and, in the very next moment, Jaskier vanished from Aretuza. The item left in his wake was delicate and strange, a fine little gem that glittered like a star--it was bound to her, just as her power was bound to him, and Yennefer of Vengerberg kept it close at hand. She had earned it, had acquired it through cunning and skill, and had paid the price for it. She had the power to change anything and it hovered at her fingertips--or rather just above her heart. It made a truly stunning necklace and the mages of Aretuza and Ban Ard became terribly nervous as they looked upon it.


	3. A truly terrible bard

Jaskier had been revitalized by the payment he'd gained from that young girl. It filled in the hollows in his soul--for that was what he had been lacking, he realized--and gave his machinations depth, gave them life and wonder, and he'd been overcome with the joy of it all. 

He danced, foolish and free, sang to rooms filled with strangers, and strummed his lute with wild and ungainly hands. They pelted him with bread, with fruit, and threw their ire at him--for that girl had no talent with song or music, had no delicate shades of feeling to loan him, but his music was finally _music_ once more. No longer did he copy, no longer did he echo the sounds that he recalled from eras long passed, he was able to create! His works were terrible, they were pedestrian, unbalanced, unpleasant, and screeching--they grated on the ears, wore through patience, and inspired anger. He was the worst bard that had ever walked the world but, by the very music of the spheres themselves, he was _a bard_.

His excitement grew beyond tempering, fed by the array of reactions, of emotions he was granted in exchange for the awful songs he strummed. They were precious gifts, the tiny lilting shades of irritation, of cutting wit and judgment, of delicate pity and distaste--he folded them into himself and with each utter failure he felt the color creep back into the world. Certainly, it was a dismal array of colors, but it seamed the gaps between the highest highs and the lowest lows. The persistent banality of his wandering, of his receptions and performances, gave meaning to the greatest joys and the darkest sorrows in his long life--he was finally able to weight his experiences.

He hadn't even dreamed he needed to...oh and dreaming, that was such a grand new adventure as his mind took shapes and sounds and bent them to a new and surreal combination of their parts.

A millennia of memory--of love and loss, wonder and sorrow, unfolded when he closed his eyes--he saw moments so precious they stole his breath and forced him to spend the day weeping for their passing. He awoke some nights, awash in sweat and black, bleeding horror as the depths of bitterest loss and grief clawed into his mind. The world was made anew with each day, with each moment, and it was a frantic, frenetic thing unlike any he had ever known. Time dilated, unfolded into more than an endless procession of moments, and he felt the way it crawled, the way it raced, and his heart truly _lived_ inside Julian's chest.

He consumed the world like a man starving and, apart from the fact that he was only a man in shape, he supposed that was not an entirely unfair comparison. 

All the wonders that he'd witnessed, all the glories he had wanted to revel in, those were the things he devoted himself to now. He became a true connoisseur of pleasure--he savored every bite of food, fine or foul, drank every wine, sampled every ale, and relished the feel of fine and rough clothing alike. He danced amid the scents of the wild and the pungent smell of fine perfume. His heart sang as he heard other bards, as he heard bawdy songs sung by passing mortals, as he joined them in their ungainly revelry, and he delved into the bitter work that musical skill demanded. He learned what made a sound beautiful, what gave it more than its shape.

Neither Jaskier nor Julian had ever been much for caution and it had been so long since Julian had been apart from him, neither could recall if he had ever been shy. Jaskier had never been and he made no effort to learn shyness or shame, not now that he had the ability to make new things, to innovate and change. The beauty of touch, of the soft and unpredictable interactions between human hearts, drew him like a moth to flame. He flitted from embrace to embrace, indulging in any indulgence that was made available to him. He savored the desires of everyone who would have him, drank them down and folded their feelings into himself. He had always been a hedonist but now he was so much more--he was the high priest of the flesh and his devotions were acts of true, unfettered love. 

How he loved the very concept of love.

He fell into love with the whole of himself, throwing himself into each new person with the full capacity of his heart and soul. He chased the promise of loving devotion, sought after that true and encompassing romantic love that he had lost so long ago, and dallied in the affections of anyone and everyone he met. He chased love and, as he fell over and over, with each new soul that caught his attention, Jaskier acquired every shade of love that existed. They fit together in a mosaic, they shone under the light of the sun, of his attention, and his dreadful music was transformed into a vibrant painting. The colors he could wield, as time marched forward, were numerous and varied and, once again, he found that he could move the hearts of men. It was less certain now than it had been...and the results were not guaranteed, but he could manage it if he worked at it.

The songs of his niece had been beautiful, that much he knew, but they were borrowed bits and pieces. Payment given in exchange for hollow magics. This was _his_ and his alone.

The breadth of his experience grew by leaps and bounds but, as he was restored, as he was finally renewed, the curiosity that formed the very floor of his being rose to the surface. He had plumbed the glorious depths of men, of elves, of dwarves, and felt drawn to more. But what was there, if not this? If not the endless pursuit of the pieces he had lost? What then was left? It was hard to want for something he didn't know, for something he had never seen nor felt, but he knew it must be real. Humans did not know what lay beyond their senses, didn't miss the beauty of the veil or the spheres, and wouldn't know to want for either--but he knew of them. 

What did he not know to want? 

What had evaded him so utterly in his time on this plane?

He knew there was something, of course, but wondering about it left him feeling puzzled and frustrated.

He traveled to slake his wanderlust, he fell in love to satisfy the edge of his curiosity, he made music to feed his soul and fuel his power, he ate and drank to appease the mortal hunger that drove him, but there was still a hole. There was always a lingering hole and he couldn't stop prodding at it, wondering what was meant to fit there.

It wasn't until the spring of his fifteen hundredth year that he finally found something that caught his whole attention, something new and promising. 

It had been an overcast day and the bite of winter still lingered in the air, even as tender shoots of grass reclaimed the landscape. He spied the man at some great distance--his white hair was strange on Julian's eyes. It drew in magic and seemed like it was wreathed in darkness even as it all but shone in the watery spring sunlight. His black armor spoke of battle, bore the tangled remnants of severed fates, and stank of--onion? Even at this distance? It was a pointedly unpleasant stench that Jaskier adored for the variety of it. The horse he rode was a young thing, a chestnut mare with keen eyes and ears. She spotted him at two hundred paces and her attention hadn't shifted once, not until her master pulled her into the stables and away from his gaze.

Jaskier had barely resisted the urge to run, to charge at the man in black and assail him with the endless questions he'd never been able to ask the first Witcher. He hadn't known there were questions to ask, that there were things to learn and experience, not when he'd met the first Witcher at that terrible ball. (Though, he suspected, if he'd asked that man more than the one question, he probably would not have been granted answers.) Now--well, he would sooner impale himself on that silver sword than let another of their order slip past him without remark.

Jaskier threw open the door to the tavern and, without anything resembling hesitation, strummed and started in on his most popular song. The room had started, just so, but half of them took very little issue with the abruptness he employed. The other half jeered and shouted, but he ignored their objections and their grinding irritation as he danced and strummed. His fingers lighted across the strings as his feet carried him, swift and graceful, around the room. It was some time before the man in black entered the tavern but, oh, when he did, Jaskier was at his very best. He was flushed with the exertion of his performance, his voice was sweet and lilting, and part of the crowd had already granted him a great deal of their delight and amusement. 

He was aglow with the emotion in the room.

He should have, perhaps, been more subtle with his attentions...but the Witcher was truly a sight to behold. He was stunning in a way that Jaskier had never seen in all the spheres. He couldn't have looked away from him if he tried and he hadn't even made the barest attempt. His blue eyes danced with mirth and promise as he played and, through some fortunate twist of fate, he managed to hold that amber and golden gaze throughout. The Witcher was hypnotizing, enthralling, and when Jaskier's final song concluded he didn't even savor the accolade--or was it revulsion--from those around him. He moved, drawn in a trance, to perch himself on the edge of that lovely man's table. He was pure coquette as he shifted, his knee folded lightly on the table, his smile and the colors on his cheeks, the light that danced in his eyes--Jaskier took a deep breath to greet him--only to be cut off by the press of something sharp against Julian's very softest pieces.

The blade had appeared without his noticing, had moved in absolute silence, and nestled itself into the space just below the spot where his hip balanced against the table. The edge kissed the fabric of his inner thigh and held, just a hair's breadth away from severing a very important vein. Jaskier was powerful and he could recover from a sudden wound of that magnitude, but he doubted the Witcher would react well...then again...this wasn't really _reacting well_ , as it was. Jaskier's smile went strained around the edges and he froze in place. That knife didn't move in the slightest.

"Well," Jaskier began, used the breath he'd drawn so that he might seduce this man into conversation, and the knife pressed a warning into the silk across his thigh. If he pressed that blade any harder, it would slice that fabric as easily as air. "I suppose that is one way to decline my company over dinner. My apologies, I have been told I can be....overly forward."

"The spell you're using. Stop or I'll make you."

Jaskier's brows rose sharply and he leaned away, just so, startled in the best way by the threat the Witcher issued. (Oh, and the voice he had given it in, that was just a masterwork of adventure and allure, rough and hard and everything that Jaskier had never truly attempted to experience.) Jaskier held his hands out in a motion of surrender, idle though it was, and very slowly unslung his lute from around his shoulders. He set it aside on the table and the Witcher promptly pulled it to his side and removed it to the floor. The knife didn't shift but Jaskier did spot the lovely medallion around his neck--it hummed against his armor, moved with the whirling chaos in the air.

That was a neat trick.

Jaskier withdrew himself and, ah, but it was hard to manage that. Julian was not made to hold the whole of him beneath his skin and Jaskier was not given to limiting the space he could take up. It was uncomfortable, stuffy even, but it calmed the Witcher's medallion and, in part, served to calm the Witcher as well. The man glowered at him with those amber eyes, those impossibly lovely eyes, and grunted a sound that was split between grudging tolerance and permission. The very instant he withdrew that blade, Jaskier dropped back, positively vibrating with delight, and promptly occupied the chair opposite him.

"You're a _Witcher_ ," Jaskier announced with quiet, awe-laden wonder. His fingers drummed energetic patterns against the wood and each quiet thud seemed to drive his companion deeper into his irritation. His wariness had tapered off once the medallion went still, and that was a kindness, but he was nowhere near welcoming as he stared at the bard across from him.

"And you're a mage," he accused in a tightly controlled monotone, growling as he sheathed his blade once more. He didn't wait for confirmation or denial of that statement and waved the barmaid over, a coin caught between his gloved fingers. She sauntered to them (with some reluctance) and took both the Witcher's order and Jaskier's. Once she left (and she did so with some impressive haste), the Witcher turned his whole attention onto Jaskier and, truth be told, he luxuriated in it. His smile was bright, kind, and eager--and, apparently, exceedingly suspicious.

"I wasn't sure there were any Witchers left," Jaskier admitted and propped his chin onto his folded hands. His expression had gone a bit saccharine, then, and he couldn't help himself. He sighed in wistful fascination and the Witcher across from him narrowed his eyes.

"What was that spell?" The Witcher demanded, Jaskier's marveling ignored as though it hadn't happened. Jaskier considered his question and how to answer it--but that was a trick, wasn't it? The Witcher was not patient. His hand shifted from the table and promptly wrapped around the hilt of one of the swords that rested alongside him.

"Oh, nothing pointed," Jaskier answered quickly and sat up, extending his hands in surrender once more. "The lute is bespelled. It helps...inspire adoration."

"Everyone hated that stupid song," he replied flatly.

"I said _helps_ , didn't I?"

His response was, if not ideal, acceptable enough, and the Witcher grunted before lowering his hand from the hilt of his sword. He gestured to Jaskier with that hand--just a flick of his fingers and a jerk of his chin, barely a movement with both combined. Jaskier was half in love with him already.

"So you're fool enough that you tried to use a bespelled lute on a Witcher...to what end?" Oh, but Jaskier knew the flavor of that feeling. The man was curious, if put upon, and Jaskier grinned at him.

"Seduction, primarily," Jaskier admitted and shrugged just so. "Though conversation and dinner is an acceptable alternative."

"You're lying." His gaze was heavy and Jaskier started just a bit at the accusation. His hand flew to his chest and he gaped.

"I've never!" His objection was entirely honest and, perhaps, he should have been more careful about that. "My desire to experience every bit of you either carnally or through conversation is wholly above reproach."

The Witcher snorted something resembling a laugh and Jaskier's grin went more than a bit smug at that. Considering how risky this whole enterprise was, how close he'd been to having a knife shoved into his inner thigh, Jaskier felt this was going wonderfully. They had something akin to a rapport, at least he felt like they did, and he stared dreamily at the man across from him as the barmaid delivered their food, ale, and a bottle of fine wine. Jaskier thought nothing of it when he plucked his own purse from his jacket and tossed it to the edge of the table for that lovely lass. It was so familiar a thing, paying whilst he reveled in a potential paramour, that the Witcher's clever little medallion slipped his mind.

Geralt's hand came down on that purse before the woman could take it and he leveled a flat glower at Jaskier. The Witcher paid, tossed his slender black purse to the table instead, and Jaskier felt his cheeks burn with a sharp spike of embarrassment as the Witcher dragged Jaskier's purse to his side of the table.

"Oh--that is--" Jaskier fumbled, eager to explain away the mechanisms of that bag, but the Witcher let out a disapproving hum as he loosened the tie and reached inside. He drew out one pressed gold coin, and another, and another after that. The symbols on them were old and random, dredged from his memory more than the world as it was, and they weighed heavily in the Witcher's palm as he hefted them. His amber eyes scrutinized those coins, then they were cast back into the pouch where they promptly vanished back to nothingness. Julian's heart skipped over itself as the Witcher turned the pouch inside out and reduced it to an ugly, satin lined ball of fabric.

"Nice trick," he complimented and it had the edge of an insult. "Believable."

Jaskier had just enough sense about him to realize that he should not take offense at the implication in that--that he was a charlatan and the coins that bag spawned were mere illusions. The Witcher was clever and suspicious and, above all things, trained to slay creatures just like him. The man was judging him, a harsh look putting an edge on that flat expression of his, and Jaskier's flush had yet to fade. He thought Jaskier was a fraud--a cheat--a mountebank--nothing more than a clever little mage who played at being a minstrel and beguiled people with his enchanted accouterments. 

It was not a terrible guess, frankly, and Jaskier's heart thrilled with the risk of this even as he balked at the assumption.

He wouldn't lie--couldn't even if he wanted to--it wasn't something that he would ever be capable of. He could allow the Witcher to believe what he would, could encourage that train of thought in action (if not conversationally), and the results of that near-deception might be truly worth the effort. The last Witcher he had met had been extremely motivated to hack him out of Julian's form, like stripping the rind of a troublesome fruit away so that he could get at the flesh within. This Witcher was wary but, on the whole, much more amicable than the last one. Jaskier, damn himself, was so deeply, hideously curious about him and the risk of mutilation wasn't enough to drive him off. If he played along, pretended at being the cad the Witcher guessed he was, it might allow him to indulge.

"Yes, I am very fond of that one," Jaskier admitted with a sigh that was mostly laughter. "Though, in the spirit of full disclosure--ah--"

He held up a finger to ask the Witcher to wait and reached around to the back of his belt. From there he drew a short dagger with a fancy, brightly colored sheath. He fished out the small handkerchief he kept in a pocket in the front of his pants, as well, and shuffled to draw a curved glass bottle from where it was tucked into the sheath of his left boot. He set all of them on the table between them and watched as the Witcher's necklace jumped and quivered more and more strongly with each addition. When it became troublesome, Jaskier grinned as the man shoved the medallion into the neck of his shirt, where it was trapped between his chest and his armor.

"Let me guess, you specialize in enchantments?" the Witcher asked, and let out a slow, heavy sigh as he regarded the items before him.

"More or less," Jaskier answered vaguely. "If you would like any of them, I would be more than happy to gift them to you. The dagger will coalesce in the scabbard if you reach for it and find it empty--very useful for someone in your venerable profession, I imagine?"

The Witcher grunted at him and Jaskier watched as he indulged his own curiosity. He plucked up the handkerchief and held the lacy square aloft between his index and middle fingers, an eyebrow cocked at Jaskier.

"Ah, that one is very fancy. If soiled, a shake will clean it. If you tuck something into its folds, it will vanish until you shake it free."

A hum and he gestured to the bottle.

"Always full...though, for my preference it is rarely full of water. Whatever you pour in, it will create endlessly until it is broken or something else is fed into it."

"Anything else?" the Witcher prompted and Jaskier shook his head, extending his arms and lifting the edges of his cuffs away from his wrists, just to show the Witcher the empty space inside his sleeves. The Witcher grunted and shoved the items aside. They formed a cluttered pile atop Jaskier's inside-out coin purse. "I wonder what kind of luck has me running into a shameless mage cum bard in this, of all towns?"

His musing was not, precisely, a question and Jaskier's brow furrowed as he tried to decode it. In fairness, Jaskier had just wandered into the town and had immediately gone to task, determined to accomplish this very conversation. He hadn't bathed, nor slept, nor even bothered to look at anything apart from the white haired man across from him. His confusion must have been terribly convincing, even to the rightfully wary Witcher, because the man hummed as he considered the bard.

"I may have a use for you," he said, gruff and unhappy and took up the mug of ale that he'd ordered.

"Ah, what sweet poetry to my ears, dear, dashing Witcher," Jaskier announced and he slung back the bottle of wine he had ordered on the Witcher's coin. The man had given him tribute, however unknowingly, and Jaskier was driven by the need to aid him, however he asked. Kindness given without expectation had value, after all, and Jaskier was driven by the principles of equivalent exchange. "I offer my services gladly, if only so I might bask a bit longer under your careful scrutiny."

The Witcher hummed a disaffected note and, once they tucked into their food, began explaining the contract that had called him here. He listened, rapt, as the Witcher spoke but found that he couldn't answer any of the questions the man prompted him with.  
Jaskier rarely dwelt in any town, in any place, longer than a night or two. He was a fleeting thing by his very nature, impermanent and mercurial, so it was hardly shocking that he barely knew the name of the kingdom they stood in. He had frustrated his dear Witcher with his ignorance, but the man had explained in patient, even tones, nonetheless. 

He had been summoned by the alderman, promised a great deal of coin, and told a grand and terrible tale of woe. 

This town, as it so happened, was called Ursi. The people of Ursi, trapped between a river and a sea port, penned in by the heavy woods that stretched to the north, had been afflicted by a terrible plague. Rats, pestilent and rabid, had flooded their fields, their streets, and the farthest corners of the forest. They had been vicious, snapping things, dangerous and deadly, and had attacked and wounded more than a few of the people who lived in Ursi. The alderman had hired a man to rid the town of the rats, had paid him a purse that would have drawn Sorcerers and Witchers from afar for the sheer size of it, and the man had done as they bid.

The man who drove the rats from the town had been a mage who played an enchanted flute.

The town was glad to be rid of the pests, happy to have their lands returned to them, but the mage who had driven the rats away returned. He had been furious, had demanded the alderman increase the size of his purse, and had taken the alderman by surprise. He demanded double for his efforts, for herding the multitudes of rodents from Ursi, but the alderman couldn't pay. They had spent every last copper half-cent to hire him in the first place; they hadn't anything left at all. The mage cursed the lot, the alderman, the people of Ursi, and the very land they walked on. He decreed, that very day, that once every moon, the children of Ursi would be called to their deaths. 

It had been four moons since he had laid that curse upon them and, at the height of each moon, the children of the village vanished into the night. The next morning they would wandered from the woods, ill and ailing, unless they did not return at all.

The Witcher was a stunning man, truly impossible to behold without becoming lost in the presence of him. Jaskier would never have guessed that anything could divert his boundless curiosity and attention from the Witcher, but here they were. 

These people were not of his blood, they were not his concern...but they were the concern of this Witcher and Jaskier had made an offer of his services. These people became his concern as easily as the Witcher had become his fascination. Their plight was so strange, sat so far beyond his usual preoccupations, that it held the whole of his attention even as the Witcher finished his tale and leveled those gleaming amber eyes at him.

Jaskier longed to reach out, to expand himself beyond the bounds of the body he wore, to test and feel and borrow the emotion that the Witcher hid so well. The medallion pinned to his chest kept Jaskier's invisible prodding at bay, though, and he sighed as he finished his wine. He fidgeted, trapped and stifled in the confines of his flesh, and rolled the bottle between his hands to distract himself from his discomfort. This mood, the persistent murky layer of impending dread that he'd tasted when he walked into this place, made more sense now...but he had grown used to such emotions hundreds of years ago. The whole of the continent was mired in dread and woe--neither had piqued his interest in centuries. 

Not until this Witcher directed his attention to them.

"And you believe it is a curse?" Jaskier asked and regarded the Witcher. The man had finished his modest meal long ago and Jaskier had silently offered some of the more extravagant fare he'd ordered. Between them, they had plucked at it, drank, and ruminated for hours. The Witcher stared at him over the edge of his cup and Jaskier hummed--it was a poor imitation of his company's gruffness. It did not fit Julian's voice at all. "It would be an impressive bit of artifice, if it truly works the way you described."

"Artifice?" 

"To lay a curse on the land is not a simple feat, my dear Witcher," Jaskier told him, generous as he ever was. "If a curse rests in the ground, where death and life mingle freely, it is because great tragedy poisoned that place...not because some penny-ante highwayman decreed it so. A curse like that requires real power and real catastrophe and, I imagine, that little medallion you wear would have missed me entirely if the ground were weeping chaos."

"Hmm," the Witcher replied and was silent as he regarded the remnants of his ale. "You're clever...for a piss poor bard."

"Ah, and the poetry persists," Jaskier announced and drew his wine bottle to his chest, swooning in his seat. "If I may bid the fluttering of my heart to still for a moment--is it not much, much more likely that the extortionist lingers, still, and abducts these poor children himself? Children are not, generally speaking, easily baffled by magic. Oh, they adore it more openly than most, and they will chase it eagerly, but it takes a much softer hold of them than grown men."

With certainty he probably should not have possessed, Jaskier added: "One could not compel a child to march to their death, no matter how brilliant the magic."

"The question, then, is how to break his hold on the children here," his companion rumbled and set his mug on the table with a heavy thunk. Jaskier laughed--it was a short, stifled, bubbling laugh, and the look he leveled at the Witcher must have been truly mystifying because the man's brows creased and his expression went angry. Jaskier leaned forward, driven by the Witcher's abruptly poor reaction, and cast his wine bottle aside so that he could reach across the table unencumbered. He settled his hands atop the gloved hand that rested on the table and took it tenderly, reassuring in a way that clashed terribly with the person he was reassuring.

"No offense meant, my dear Witcher," Jaskier assured him, the flush of wine filling his body with a comfortable, happy warmth. "But if that is the heart of your dilemma, then I do believe I can be of much greater service to you than pleasant conversation and a carnal tumble."

"I never agreed to a carnal tumble," the Witcher told him, but the harshness of his mood smoothed over just a bit. He did not withdraw his hand from where the bard's rested atop it.

"Details," Jaskier dismissed and waved a hand about in airy dismissal. "Return my lute before the full moon rises and I will see that no harm claims the children of Ursi."

Jaskier felt a shift, a heavy jerk in the center of his chest, and his besotted expression dropped away in an instant. His expression drifted, lost and confused, and he withdrew to his seat--

The compact was struck and he was bound to his careless word. 

He had...without... _fuck_. 

Julian's hand shook as he reached up and combed it back through his rakish, loose curls. Smoothing his hair did nothing to settle the cold, crawling apprehension that snuck into his limbs. He didn't feel the flush leave him, nor the look of despondence settle on his face, but he did feel the Witcher's heavy hand as it came down on his shoulder and gripped him. The man jostled him and Jaskier, awash with regret and worry, startled as he looked back up. Whatever the Witcher read in his face, it inspired little more than a soft grunt and fingers dug into the fabric of his doublet.

"Come on," the Witcher said and it was rough, even if the volume was pitched low and quiet. "You've had enough."

The human hauled him up by his shoulder and braced against him as he stumbled along. He recalled his belongings distantly, as they approached the stairs of the inn, but the Witcher offered him assurances as he led him up and to the end of a long, shifting hall. Perhaps it didn't shift, he couldn't recall that being a standard behavior of hallways, but Jaskier felt unsteady the longer it went. He had never granted a compact on accident before, had never been so moved that he'd spoken as carelessly as he did with the Witcher. 

In exchange for his own lute, a trinket of woven magic and stray feeling, he had granted this town a perpetual blessing of protection.

What would happen if he didn't fulfill the compact? What would it cost him? The lute was meaningless...but if he was stripped of his music again, if the parts he had earned, had built were carved away--panic rose alongside bile and the contents of his dinner. No, he would fulfill the compact, even if the children here mattered precious little to him. The Witcher would notice, though, and his hopes of something new, something adventurous, would be dashed apart. He had only just begun to enjoy this man--it had been so long since he last heard tell of a Witcher--what if he never saw another of them?

Jaskier was shoved (albeit gently) onto an uneven straw mattress and, suddenly presented with the ceiling and little else, he sputtered a bit. He felt a tug at his boot and the cold as it was drawn away--first one then the other--and the laugh he let out was an octave higher than he was wont. The manic energy in it was terribly unflattering. He pushed himself up onto his elbows and turned his attention to the stoic Witcher, the man he had so aggressively claimed to be seducing, and felt his confidence crumble away. Those amber eyes regarded him placidly, and only moved away from his when the Witcher set his boots aside and rose. He began to remove his own cloak and Jaskier felt his extremities go numb.

"My apologies, my dear Witcher," Jaskier began, his tone warbling and just this side of faint. "Other considerations have shaken me, somewhat--though I would love nothing more than to participate in...whatever is happening here, I fear my attention is elsewhere."

"Shut up, bard, and go to sleep." The Witcher said and Jaskier blinked at him mutely. "Tomorrow you're coming hunting with me."

"Oh--am I?"

"What did I just say?"


	4. The Other Beast

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot of graphic violence ahead. Just. Heads up.

Jaskier was an indulgent soul, he enjoyed few things more than leisure and comfort--and both, doubly so, if he had company to indulge with.

The handsome Witcher was decidedly not an indulgent soul. The human was spartan, gruff, severe, and rose at such hours that Jaskier had wondered, briefly, if he planned to duel the rising sun. That idea had conjured a truly glorious dream as he'd drifted on the border of waking and slumber but, alas, he had not been able to fall back into it. The Witcher rose and, as he did, so too did Jaskier. They had work to do and, as it happened, the Witcher was the sort of person who took a very methodical approach to his work.

Within an hour of waking, the man had started grinding, mixing, and boiling together concoctions the likes of which Jaskier had never seen--or smelled. His attention was iron-clad and his hands moved swiftly and efficiently, he was a master of this craft--whatever the craft was. The stench of it was truly boggling, that alone had been enough to drive the bard from their rooms and keep him out. Eventually, Jaskier presumed it was after he had finished his task, the Witcher joined him in the tavern, ate his breakfast, and they left to examine the lands around Usir.

The Witcher traveled up and down the valley, wound his way through the trees and undergrowth of the forest, rode to the very edges of Ursi, and back. His horse moved at a comfortable clip and Jaskier had to jog to keep pace with them. It was tiring, keeping up with that mare, and disheveled him terribly within only a few hours. The Witcher examined, searched, scented, and gamely resisted Jaskier's every attempt at polite conversation all the while. He was a stony fellow, chilly in demeanor and expression, but with just the barest edge of something sprightly beneath the surface--Jaskier wondered if he had been born in the springtime, in these weeks of ending cold and renewed growth, but hadn't bothered asking that aloud.

Somehow, he doubted the man would give him more than a hum in response, regardless of the question.

Jaskier attended to the searching as best he was able--he saw no sign of mage and felt no raw magic coursing through the air--but was mostly useless to the methodical man he followed. He strummed and skipped behind him, winded and ruffled, and delighted in every moment despite his many, many discomforts. He savored their time beneath the spring sun, plucked and played to the people of Ursi, and kept close behind the Witcher as he went about his day. He watched the flowers as they opened along the roadside, breathed deep from the lingering chill on the air, and relished the crunch of gravel beneath his fine shoes.

Apparently, his whole attitude made him completely insufferable. The Witcher told him so (though in far fewer words) but he didn't take it to heart. In fact, he offered the Witcher an indulgent and besotted smile whenever he cast his irritated gaze Jaskier's way.

The Witcher's moodiness was less than ideal, but it was a part of him, entrenched enough that Jaskier could hardly fault him for it. The day was perfect--well, largely--the only objectionable part of the day, the very single unfortunate note in the symphony of spring, was that medallion the Witcher wore round his neck. Because of that little bauble, he was forced to rein himself in, to crush himself into the bounds of his body and resist sampling the feelings that danced in the air. It jumped and shook at the barest provocation, no matter how tightly he pushed himself down into Julian's form, and the dark looks the Witcher shot him grew wearisome.

Valuable as Jaskier imagined that trinket might be to a mortal man, he couldn't help but dislike it.

Still, he tried not to ruminate on it--it did Jaskier no good to let something as small as that distract him from such persistent loveliness.

(The day was very fine as well.)

The compact he had made regarding this town had been an unfortunate mistake but, the longer he wandered the valley of Ursi, the fewer his misgivings became. This town was small, quiet, and given to peace. The people weren't terribly hard to ply with songs and smiles, even if they were wary of both him and his Witcher companion. (The washer women had even joined in singing with him when he strayed near enough to serenade them.) Protecting the children of this place would be a quiet, boring duty that would only last as long as the little town did. Overall, he doubted his protection would so much as wrinkle the tapestry of fate. Really, it was hardly worth complaining about, let alone dreading.

His melodrama the night before seemed hideously overblown in the light of this wonderful day.

The Witcher grew tired of his prancing by mid-afternoon, just as Jaskier completed playing a song to the human's snappish and surly mount. The Witcher's summary dismissal was a pity, truly a shame, but Jaskier didn't let it spoil his mood. The human wandered off, into the forest behind the town, and Jaskier took the opportunity to stretch himself out. He hadn't any idea how far that medallion's surveillance might reach, but he felt bold and bright in the afternoon sun. The children of Ursi found him then, as he lit with the late afternoon light, and the lack of the imposing Witcher as his side was like an invitation.

They gathered around him, smiling and curious, and Jaskier let his eyes linger on each of their faces.

The children had a haunted look about them, piteous and skittish, and he felt a twinge of sorrow pluck at his core. They danced and laughed as he played, but the specter of their curse hung over them like a dangling noose, it kept closer to them than the hovering wariness that gripped the adults around them. Before long, Jaskier's pity moved him, and he decided to grant a gift into the spell of his protection. He sang brighter and bolder, danced with the children, and he took that lingering terror from them. The emotion made him ill, turned Julian's stomach as it coiled inside him, but he persisted. The children dimmed around him but, when he poured out joy into his song, they perked up--his head felt light but they were renewed by the frolicking, made stronger as Jaskier burned some of himself away to feed their little lights.

One by one, the cares of the children drifted away. The sudden and honest delight in their laughter drew a crowd and some of the color crept back into the murky landscape of Ursi. Jaskier played through his discomfort, through the dizzying draw as he fueled their joy, and Jaskier's world became fuzzy for the exchange. He hardly noticed his audience as it grew, as adults gathered and joined, as the pull on his reserves moved from a trickle to a steady stream. Fortunately, the day grew late with some speed. The sun set before long and, with it, each child was led away to their homes. The streets emptied and, when he was finally alone, Jaskier finally let his fingers still.

"You have endurance, I'll give you that."

The gruff comment startled him and Jaskier jumped clean off the ground, his heart jerking in his chest--his discomfort earned him a dry huff of laughter and that, if nothing else, managed to soothe his embarrassment. The Witcher, dressed all in black and without his unfriendly mount, looked staggeringly fearsome as darkness fell. His gold eyes, lit from within like tiny glimmering lanterns, fixed on Jaskier as the last of the sunlight faded. Jaskier let out a long, thready sigh in response but his admiration was clipped short by the rattling sound of that medallion. He shot the necklace a dark look and let out a longer, steadying breath as he withdrew.

Unfortunately, drawing himself back into Julian's shape was more uncomfortable now. The confines of his body magnified the nausea that had been nagging at him, sent a frisson of that lingering dread down his spine. The shifting sensation was disorienting and sapped the sincerity from the smile he leveled at the handsome Witcher.

"A truly shining review," Jaskier replied dryly as the man strode to close the distance between them. He had not been standing far at all and his gaze was heavy as he walked. Despite himself, Jaskier felt a thrill of fascination grip him as the Witcher approached--it was all he could do to shift his fingers along the lines of his lute. "I am certain, dear Witcher, that I could be persuaded to give an encore, if one were so desir--"

"You look like you're going to pass out," the human declared as he leaned in, his scrutiny not the least bit alluring. Jaskier's cheerful innuendo was cut short and the bard let out a strangled, ungainly squawk.

"Excuse me?" Jaskier asked and his hand settled against his chest in reflexive offense. The sudden emotional shift was enough to make his stomach roll again, sadly, and he swayed back with the force of that. The Witcher grunted a note of judgment and Jaskier promptly waved a hand in his face, waspish and petty as he sniffed and stepped back. 

"I am quite fine, better than fine, in fact--I am positively awash in pure, formidable resolve," Jaskier assured him and turned the heady sway of that backwards step into a skip and spin, as though he were still dancing for that young audience. The Witcher looked unconvinced but said little. He gave them a few moments, then, as Jaskier recounted his afternoon and the Witcher, notably, did not. Once Jaskier looked less unsteady, the Witcher waved him on and they began their watch.

It had been a foolish thing, it turned out, expending a portion of himself to brighten this town.

Ursi wasn't cursed, not in the sense that Jaskier understood curses, but it was certainly not safe. The land was infested and that infestation had taken both he and the Witcher by surprise. Night fell, as it was wont to, but as the midnight hour approached the depths of the night had intensified throughout Ursi, swallowing it whole. The mage that they sought, some human with a bespelled flute, had not hidden nearby. There was no mage in the whole of the valley, flutist or otherwise, and no one stole through the town abducting children. The truth of things had been much, much worse. The situation was more terrible than Jaskier would have ever guessed--even he felt a frisson of terror as it began.

The children rose from their beds as a group, driven from their homes by a scratching, scuttling terror that clawed just beneath the surface of what was real. The Witcher hadn't felt it, but his medallion had--and Jaskier had been set instantly on edge. The children weren't bespelled when they scrambled into the night, nor were they dreaming or led by unseen hands as they fled into the woods. Jaskier had planned to halt them with song, had understood that he need only break a spell across them, but no amount of strumming could have slowed their mad dash into the forest. They'd avoided the Witcher hands with the nimble grace of childhood, had darted past them both, running too fast to even scream, and Jaskier had felt the bare edges of the invisible teeth that nipped at their heels.

They gave chase, of course, for there was little else to do. They bolted into the woods, raced after the children, but the underbrush was thick and it was terribly dark and no grown man, be they Witcher or _Fae_ , could overtake a child that ran with terror spurring them forward. It shouldn't have been surprising, really, that when the creatures appeared it was Jaskier they attacked first--he was the slowest of the pack, the easiest to overtake, and overtake him they did. He heard the claws, the scrambling, and saw just the thinnest pricks of them against the veil alongside him. 

The first snarl curdled the blood and, shamefully, Jaskier's shock consumed him. He stumbled as Julian froze inside him, rendered beyond thought with the gnawing memory of this fear. The air split at the very stroke of midnight--the sounds of the creatures, snapping and hissing as they were, carved through the barrier between the real and beneath--and suddenly the world was awash in bladed claws and gnashing teeth. The shadows became a shape, great and terrible, and all at once Jaskier was face to face with one of the old creatures, one of the _other_ beasts. It took Jaskier by absolute surprise, attacking him as he recovered his footing.

The Witcher, as it happened, was much harder to take by surprise.

Unfortunately, he was by far and away easier to kill.

The jaws that had snapped through the edge of dreaming, that cut into the real air about them, had gone for Julian's throat as they broke through the veil. They dove upon him him, tore flesh from his shape, and sent Jaskier sprawling amid the trees of Ursi's forest. They'd have snapped Julian's face clean away, would have done terrible damage to Jaskier, himself, had the Witcher not intervened. He dove as the creature ripped at Julian, dug hand and blade into the solidity of the shadow, and pinned that creature to the forest floor. He wrestled it down, bent it with the strength in his arms, drove his shining silver blade into the beast--Jaskier had marveled a moment, moved by the sight of the mortal bending a creature like that to his will--but he didn't know--didn't realize--this beast wasn't a monster, not a mortal one--

The Witcher drew back to strike it, to attack the writhing mass of shadow, and it twisted beneath him. It flowed past the Witcher's hands like water, bent and contorted around the spot where that blade had pinned it, and reformed on the other side of him, beyond the reach of his arms. It's maw parted with a groaning like the buckling of a rotted hull--those terrible teeth, hundreds upon hundreds of them came down and carved into the human. They parted armor as easily as flesh, tore through him and into him, and filled the forest with the sounds of rending flesh and mortal agony. Jaskier watched in frozen terror and felt something sickening settle in his stomach--the Witcher's blood spilled, splattered across his face and the ground, the trees and underbrush. He didn't--he wasn't strong enough to kill this--the Witcher's grip on his sword failed and, as the silver blade tumbled, the shadow beast was freed. It dove through the hole it had carved out of the Witcher and flowed into the woods, a dancing nightmare in the darkness--it wouldn't be long before it found the fleeing children--

"Oh--oh no-no-no--" Jaskier babbled and scrambled across the distance to the fallen Witcher's side. Julian's hands slid in the ichor, as they gripped the dirt and brush and helped him pull himself to the mortal warrior's side.

_Oh--_

Jaskier had forgotten how terrible those jaws were--he had seen this before, had repaired the aftermath of it, but he had lacked the capacity to really understand the horror before. The savagery was too much, now, and Jaskier had folded too many human emotions into himself to withstand the sight of it unaffected. Julian's chest was tight, with pain and terror, and Jaskier swallowed around him--around the shriek that coiled in his throat--as he all but threw himself down beside the Witcher. His hands fluttered with helpless, desperate energy, trembled above the gaping hollow in the man's chest, over the places where his hips and legs no longer joined with the rest of him. His blood was black and hissing against the dirt and--

"Run--"

The command was choked and Jaskier's eyes flew up to met the bloodied amber pair that looked up at him. At once Jaskier felt far too many things, he was drowning in the whole of it with no outlet and no way to translate it--his hands shifted, fell to the sides of that handsome, too-pale face, and he leaned in close. The Witcher lived, though not for much longer--he should have been insensate with the pain of it, should have been beyond spoken word and thought--How long had it been since Jaskier had last seen a Witcher? How rare and wondrous were they, truly? This one had dove between him and one of the _other_ beasts, had given tribute, had given his very life for the life of something _fae_ \--

"Make a deal with me," Jaskier demanded urgently, breathed it against the Witcher's lips as he bent his head close, as he stared desperately into those gold eyes. "Please--anything--let me fix this--"

" _\--run--_ " The Witcher wheezed, and Jaskier could feel the little light inside him guttering in the night. He was so close, so near to death--could Jaskier restore him? Would it work on his kind? He had no idea--he had not attempted such things in more than a thousand years. The Witcher's medallion hammered against the remains of his armor like a second heartbeat and Jaskier's fury spiked--he tore a hand from the Witcher's face and grabbed the damnedable thing. A sharp tug snapped it free of the Witcher's neck and he cast it aside in a single vicious throw. It scalded the flesh from Julian's palm, stripped away a swath of the mortal form he wore, and Jaskier's light spilled out as he lowered his hand.

His light cast the darkened forest in sudden, shifting, dappled twilight, and he felt the Witcher try to recoil.

The look in those gold eyes was hard, angry, and unforgiving.

Jaskier bent his head again, folded himself forward until his forehead was pressed against the Witcher's. His grip gentled as it returned to the human's face, turned from panicked force to careful, fleeting brushes of his fingers against the Witcher's cooling skin. Julian's hands shook against the Witcher's face--his chest lurched as the terror of those children called to him, as the compact pulled at him--he couldn't--he wasn't strong enough to fight it--he had spent too much energy to bring them joy--

" _\--please--_ " Jaskier whispered against his face, begged in a quiet, broken voice, as he looked into those eyes. "Just-- _just say my name_ \--demand I fix this--I _can fix this_ \--"

Witchers were too wound up in Destiny, it was in their very nature, in the way they were made--this one was tangled in hundreds upon thousands of threads, to do anything for him would be to grip Destiny itself and overturn it--the terror Jaskier felt was all consuming. He couldn't bring himself to gift anything, his fear froze him in place--he wanted to, so very badly, how he wanted to just bend and make this all so that it had never been. He had never wanted to do something so badly in all his long life--he tried, tried so very hard, started to stretch himself out, to fold it all back, but he couldn't quite finish. He couldn't bring his power to bear--he knew fear now. He had learned regret, caution, grief, woe--he was made uncertain by all the worries, all the shades of emotion he had been given--he couldn't be uncertain and weave the threads of fate, he couldn't control shaking hands and do what had to be done--someone else had to be certain for him--

Someone else had to control him and make it so.

 _Please_ , make it so--

"Call my name, please-- _Jaskier_ ," he said and the word left Julian's lips in reverse, drawn through his teeth as though the Witcher had breathed it in, had taken it. It was a gift, a gift nothing else in this world had ever been given, and the only thing he could grant in exchange for his life. " _\--please, just say it--_ "

Jaskier's eyes danced across his, stared into those gold and amber eyes, and watched as the Witcher's light began to fade. Jaskier couldn't hear him speak, not as the compact yanked at his chest, but the Witcher spoke--had given in to his pleas and begging--and he felt the command wash over him, frigid and clear.

It was so easy to spend himself this way--as easy as falling--

The midnight hour struck like a hammer on an anvil--Jaskier was all but thrown awake as it reverberated through his skull, as the sound of scraping and clawing lingered against his throat. The sensation was enough to make Julian's skin crawl, to cause the whole of him to convulse as he scrambled, shivering from his bed. This, as it happened, was a rather poor idea--the pleasant flush of alcohol hadn't left him, yet, and Julian's body hadn't caught up to the sudden shift in time--he stumbled, his legs nearly giving way beneath him as his body struggled to assess itself. He cast about with his hands as he tried to find his bearings.

The room was pitch dark and it took some time for Julian's eyes to rejoin him--he swayed and crashed, rather loudly and awkwardly, into a low table and then into the chair alongside it. There was a dreadful cacophony of noise as everything on that table hit the floor, as the table was upended before him and the chair knocked aside. He sucked in a pained breath as his shin crashed, as the tender part of his foot stepped on something hard and--oh, he knew the shape of that dagger! The feel of his handkerchief--he bent and scooped them up at once, clutched them tightly and moved with jittery speed as he tucked the former into the back of his leggings and the latter into the pocket at his hip.

A heavy footfall hit the floor behind him, and another--the boards beneath his feet quaked with the weight of it and oh, how he jumped when he spun back around.

The panic that lanced through Julian was the same that carved into Jaskier, then, and they were very briefly in complete alignment. He stared, blind and fearful at the direction of those sounds, and edged back toward the--fuck was that a wall behind him? His hands groped the bare wood, the bits of plaster and mud that sealed it--yes, that was a wall and a window--he fumbled and shoved the shutters outward, forced the clasp that held them until it snapped and they burst outward. The moonlight that drifted in was thin and hazy, half obscured by clouds, but the shape in the darkness was not nearly what Jaskier expected.

It was absolutely what he'd hoped, however, and the relief that flooded him was a powerful, overwhelming thing.

"Oh--" Jaskier announced, his voice a strangled whine, as he sagged back against the windowsill, suddenly boneless and happy. His hand, the one that had pushed at the shutters so very desperately, fell to the center of Julian's chest and gripped at the open collar of his chemise. The slight tug against his hair, the gentle pull of fabric against his shoulders, the familiar shape of his hand, was almost enough to calm the human. He sucked in a stuttering breath and sounded more whole as he continued, half babbling: "My dear, lovely, wondrous, Witcher--my apologies--I mistook you for something else--"

Jaskier cut himself off with a shivering sigh as he came down from the exertion of what he'd done. The spike of his terror was gone, for the moment, and the crushing weight of exhaustion pressed down on him all at once. He had folded back the fabric of the world and the toll it took on him was enormous--he was so tired, so very drawn, that he hardly filled the whole of Julian. The gaps where he ended, before the human did, made him lightheaded and, as he realized the discrepancy, another bolt of panic wound through him--he couldn't do that again.

He couldn't turn it back again, it was too much--he couldn't even look at Destiny, couldn't check the fabric of it--his stomach rolled and his hand tightened against his chest.

He needed to do something else, something to be certain that what he'd just suffered wouldn't come to pass again.

The Witcher's presence was forgotten, for the moment, and Jaskier's eyes searched the air as he sorted through his long memory for the answer. The solution was a simple one, he had to put a pin in the fabric of the world, something that he might tether his stitching to, but he lacked anything he could commit to the process. Everything he wore was something he had woven from sylph and nothingness. Nothing he had was strong enough to resist the pull of the spheres, all of it false--oh, not everything.

Julian was real, so very real.

Jaskier drew the knife from the sheath at his back and drove the tip of it through the sleeve of his silken doublet and into Julian's arm. The human was too consumed with panic, too mired in shock to notice as Jaskier drew the blade over flesh and cut a strip of his flesh away--a simple piece would do. He had nearly finished the task when his wrist was wrenched painfully to the side--Julian's whole arm jerked and he twisted with it, surrendered to the force before Julian's bones broke--the knife was pried from his hand and cast to the floor. It clattered and, as his bloodied hand reached toward it, he was shoved back against the wall.

"What the fuck are you doing!?"

The question was barked, sharp and sudden, right into his face, and it still somehow managed to startle him. The Witcher kept his arm at a strange angle, curved out, and held so tightly that the bones strained against one another. He winced as the human's grip tensed and gave him an honestly bewildered look--Jaskier was mystified both by his presence and the strength of his reaction. This, apparently, was not the correct response because the Witcher growled at him and grabbed his other shoulder. He hauled him up, bodily, until he was standing upright and then pressed him back against the wall.

"Are you insane?" the Witcher demanded, expression laced with open alarm and more than a hint of distrust.

Stood in the watery darkness, Jaskier had a long moment where the memory of teeth swam through his mind. The distant scent of _other_ beasts mingled with the scent of the Witcher, with the stench of his own blood. His mind fought against the wine that still meandered through Julian's head. The Witcher was looking at him with such open confusion, such shock and revulsion, that it made him doubt--had he been dreaming? Had it been a terrible nightmare? A memory of Julian's given form as a dream? It wouldn't have been the first time he had awoken like this, convinced that something wholly unlikely had happened--could there truly have been one of the old creatures here?

The look in those gold eyes was familiar, if lesser than he recalled, and the moments before began to blend around the edges of now--at least they had, until that damned medallion jangled and jumped and grazed Julian's adam's apple.

The contact was bare, hardly more than a brush of metal to skin, but it made him start and gasp at the sudden, visceral reminder and--no--no, he had not dreamed those teeth. The fear that lanced through him was consuming and the Witcher leaned back suddenly, as though the force of it had struck him. Julian's heart raced, beat a wavering, jagged tremolo inside his ribs, each hammering pulse slurring into the next, and Jaskier swallowed around it as he tried to force it to slow. Pain seized Julian's chest and Jaskier grimaced as he felt himself swoon--despite the harshness of his grip, the Witcher moved quickly and caught him, strong arms shifting beneath Julian's to hold him up.

"Shit--" Jaskier wheezed as he sagged against the Witcher--distantly, he realized that the man wasn't wearing his armor, nor even a shirt. Oh...how precious little of his bulk was the fault of that armor...oh...how much flesh that creature had torn away. It was a strange sensation, being split between desire--the desire to drag his fingers along those ribs, to feel the rise of his pectorals, the dip of his waist just to feel the flesh, to savor it--but how he wanted to be certain that it was all intact, that it was warmed by the flame that lit his gold eyes, that he hadn't--

"Calm down--" the Witcher demanded and pulled him closer. His tone had gentled, somewhat, and the shift caught in Jaskier's ears like a song. He dragged Julian from the window and back to the bed. He was dumped with somewhat more ceremony than the last time, and his heart lurched just slightly as the Witcher drew back and gave him a worried look.

"I have to--my knife--" Jaskier tried to explain but speaking was difficult, it kept catching around the bile that rose in Julian's throat. His left arm bled freely and he felt it soaking the sleeve of his doublet through. The Witcher drew back and, once his hands were freed, Jaskier reached for that wound--moved and pressed his fingers into it--gripped the flesh he'd parted so he could tear that strip free. It did nothing to help Julian's state, but he would apologize later--he had to set the pin before--

The Witcher's hand came down against his chest and knocked the air out of him in a wheeze. The wash of magic over his skin was sudden and numbing. The spell he used was blunt and inelegant; it bludgeoned Julian into submission, even as it bent and deformed against Jaskier's shape inside him. His heart juddered and slowed so suddenly that he forgot how to breathe--all at once, the adrenaline, the terror, was pushed out of him and he felt empty and hollow in the wake of it. His limbs trembled with the sudden hollow weakness and he gaped like a fish, drawn above water.

The Witcher suddenly consumed his vision.

"Breathe, bard--" he commanded urgently, confusion heavy on his features.

Jaskier did as he was bade and Julian's chest shuddered as he drew a full, deep breath and let it out. The next was easier--as was the one that followed. The Witcher hovered over him, the weight and bulk of him pressing Jaskier back into the bed, his hands were caught up in the Witcher's grip, tangled and pressed into Julian's belly. He was pinned and, as Julian's panic subsided, the pain from the wound in his arm floated to the forefront of their minds. He winced, tears forming at the edges of his vision, and the Witcher finally began to loosen his hold.

"What--" Jaskier wheezed as he kept breathing. His head swam. "What did you just do?"

" _Axii_ ," the Witcher replied and, at first, seemed to toy with the idea of explaining. He didn't, nor did he release Julian's hands as he levered himself back and removed his weight from where it pinned him to the bed. "What the fuck were you doing?"

The question was asked calmly but with an underlying thread of anger and worry. Jaskier felt his expression soften with sorrow as he stared up at him, overcome with the sudden force of his feelings. He stared at the Witcher and saw that face covered in blood, fading into the night, and all his woe tried to bubble up from the very depths of his soul. Julian's eyes wept freely and he didn't bother to sit up as he stared at the Witcher. The words to explain took him a moment but, in this particular instance, the Witcher was patient.

"I can't undo it again," Jaskier breathed and felt the Witcher go stiff above him. The grip on his arms tensed and Julian let out an unhappy whimper--the Witcher's fingers slackened the very second after, but he still was not freed. "I have to bind the moment--please--I can't undo it again."

Those gold eyes bore into his for a long time. Julian's dizzying slow pulse thundered along under the press of the Witcher's fingers. He stared back at the man above him and, as he was on the cusp of begging once more, the Witcher relented and freed him. His movements were sluggish under the effect of _Axii_ but Jaskier managed to sit up and shove the ruined sleeve of his doublet back. He let out a whine filled with pain and pity as he stared at the jagged wound he'd cut into Julian. The flesh he'd parted from his forearm hung in a bloody mess like a ribbon, dangling from just below his elbow.

"Well, no points for technique," he breathed and attempted levity. The Witcher did not laugh, nor did he seem particularly pleased as Jaskier used his fingers to tear the strip away. His short, quiet whimper made the Witcher's expression go hard. He was even less amused when Jaskier reached behind himself and drew his dagger from the empty sheath at his back. The power he poured into the air, then, made the medallion at the Witcher's neck jump and jangle so eagerly he worried it might snap itself free of the cord that held it. Jaskier drove the blade through the strip of flesh and pinned it to the air beside the bed. It stayed as he removed his hands, driven into time as though it were solid wood.

Silence gripped the room and Jaskier let out a sigh of relief as both the blade and bloodied strip were taken, as they vanished into the endless procession of moments and tethered him, quite firmly, to _then_.

"Alright, bard." The voice beside him, grave and serious, had no more room for patience. Jaskier looked back at the Witcher, at those gold eyes that glimmered just slightly in the dark, and felt his heart lurch just so. "Explain. Now."

The effects of the Witcher's calming spell lingered but they were, quite honestly, not enough to completely settle either Julian or Jaskier. He looked back at the surly Witcher and then down at his arm. He had truly made a mess of Julian's lovely skin, had just hacked into it gracelessly--but, he supposed, that was to be expected. He had never bothered learning to handle a knife. He gripped the elbow of his wounded arm and looked back at the Witcher, his eyes drifting woozily with the shift.

"I don't suppose you would humor me with a bandage and a drink? Preferably in that order...though I would take them the other way round."

Now that he was conversational, the Witcher's hesitance melted away. The man rose, livid, and stalked across the darkened room to his bags. Jaskier listened as he rustled through them, as he drew something from the stack, and dragged it back to the bed. He tossed a heavy leather bag down on the floor by the bed and gave him a warning look before turning and lighting a candle that Jaskier had managed to knock off the low table. The sudden illumination was welcome but, unfortunately, just made it more apparent how haphazard his hacking into Julian's body had been.

"Oh, I am so sorry, my friend," he murmured as he ran his fingers along his arm. The Witcher growled at him with wordless fury and the light drew closer as he returned to the bedside.

"We're not friends," he assured Jaskier and, for a moment, the bard was confused. "Start talking," he demanded and dropped to a knee in front of Jaskier. He sorted through his bag with speed and drew a steel needle and a sinew thread from it. Jaskier watched him with open fascination as he threaded it, as he draped it across his leg and then rooted through the bag once more. He drew out a bottle of something clear and liquid. His patience came to an end as he tugged the stopper from that bottle with his teeth. He said nothing but glowered darkly at Jaskier.

"Oh, yes, of course--" he started and jerked against the Witcher's hold as he dumped a healthy amount of that white alcohol over the gash in his arm. The Witcher's grip tightened around his wrist and Jaskier hissed as the burning sensation gradually faded. "Right--" he continued, voice thready and distant, and grit his teeth as the Witcher burned the tip of his needle in the candle flame and began haphazardly sewing Julian's skin closed. It was dreadfully interesting to watch but the sight of it drove him to distraction, forcing recollections of the other horrors he had recently witnessed.

He made himself look away, stared instead at the Witcher's focused expression and sleep disheveled hair, and tried to order his words.

Explain--oh, but how to even begin?

"I--" Jaskier breathed and pondered while the Witcher sewed his arm up. The numbing effect of that spell kept him calm but made him dull, his words were less clever and he would be less careful with them if he was distracted. (This was a dangerous thing; he was already too easy around the Witcher.)

"This place is not cursed," Jaskier told him because, that, if nothing else, he was certain about. "There is no mage faffing about abducting children--but, oh, how I wish it were."

The Witcher finished his last suture and shot him a skeptical look. Jaskier winced as he hoisted Julian's arm and bit the thread off. He cast the stitching supplies back into his bag with little fanfare and, a moment later, dumped another healthy amount of alcohol across those stitches. The burn of the alcohol on his wound was less, this time, and he barely struggled to recoil the limb as it dried. The Witcher sorted through his bag a moment but let out a frustrated sound as he came away with nothing. He eyed Jaskier and, without asking, snatched the handkerchief that hung from the front of Jaskier's pants. He soaked the fabric in the alcohol and set about roughly wiping down the rest of Julian's arm.

He hadn't even realized how bloodied he'd become.

"Well?" The Witcher growled as he wrung pinkish alcohol out onto the floor and re-wet his rag.

"There's a--" Jaskier continued and was at a loss. He made a vague sound deep in his throat and the Witcher gave him a sharp look as he cast about for the right words. "I don't know what to call it," he admitted and the human before him sighed with frustration. "The rats, I doubt they were simply creatures--they came with it when it--"

"You're not very eloquent for a bard," the Witcher complained and tossed Jaskier's soiled handkerchief aside. He dug bandages from his bag and started wrapping the bard's forearm without pause. The linen pulled at the stitching, it was a harsh and rough fabric, but Jaskier hadn't the energy to complain.

"There aren't words," Jaskier told him, an edge of peevishness creeping into his voice. He was failing--he had to fix this, had to make it right, and he had to explain to manage that. He needed this man's help. He wasn't strong enough to fight that thing and survive it--and the compact he had struck would drive him to attempt it. He didn't want to die, not to that creature, not for an accidental compact...but, more than that, he didn't want to let those children be torn apart as the Witcher had. "I--I can show you, I think."

"You think?" The Witcher asked and his suspicion was tangible, even without Jaskier stretching outside of himself to taste it. Those sharp, gold eyes settled on him, distrustful and cold, but the force behind them wavered just slightly. Julian was pale at the best of times--he had lost quite a lot of blood, had been driven to near collapse with panic--Jaskier was sure he looked a sight, right then.

"I...spent quite a lot of myself to undo it," Jaskier admitted quietly, hesitantly. "And then to...to bind us to the moment--I'm not strong. I don't know if...if it will work."

His admission cooled the Witcher's temper and the man grunted at him as he finished wrapping the wound. His touch was, well, not delicate...so much as it was not indelicate. He tied off the bandage and heaved a great, resigned sigh as he closed his bag. He grit his teeth and, after a pause, turned his gaze back to Jaskier. His medallion quavered against his collarbone and Jaskier watched it until he spoke.

"I hate mages," he complained idly, but there was no heat behind it. "Alright, how do you have to _'show me'_?"

He wasn't sure if this could work as it had with the girl in Aretuza. She had seen time refolded, but she had been within his understanding of it. He had been strong at the time, rested, and uninjured when he took her along. His sense of the world was so much greater than Julian's, allowed for so much more latitude in what they saw, but it hadn't been colored with sensation, with emotion...it had been less and more at once. Julian's experience would be clearer, far more useful and pointed than Jaskier's...and he wasn't sure if he could conjure his own understanding for the Witcher...or if he should. He debated as he looked into those gold eyes--debated how to do this, whether he should, whether it would help--

Jaskier hesitated as he flexed his bloodied hand.

The pain that lanced up his arm was not inconsiderable but he could suppress it, he had ignored worse before. He swallowed around his reluctance and leaned forward to graze his fingers over the Witcher's hand. The human turned the appendage, offered up his palm, and Jaskier hesitated again. Worry and weakness stayed his hand in equal measure, but there was nothing for it--he lacked words.

A moment passed and Jaskier swallowed as he pressed his hand into the Witcher's, as he wound his fingers around the human's wrist.

The Witcher sucked in a sharp breath as the world unfolded around them. It was a hazy thing, incomplete and wavering, a dream superimposed atop the room they stood in. The forest formed, the sounds and sights of the children as they fled into the night, but Jaskier's hand flinched around the Witcher's. It was too hard to keep them separate from what they saw, to let the Witcher view the memory from a place aside, removed from the horror and sensation. Jaskier felt faint as he sustained the attempt and had to grip him tighter as he failed, as the space around them collapsed in--they shifted and, at once, the Witcher was granted Julian's eyes. He felt the man recoil on reflex, drawing back at the sheer force of Julian's terror, at the very experience of being trapped in Julian's body. Jaskier gripped his wrist so tightly he worried he might tear his own stitches in the process--

The memory of the air splitting was clear, even inside Julian's form. That _other_ beast broke the surface of the world with a sensation like a knife driven through his ribs--the Witcher flinched and flexed beneath his grip. Julian knew the shape of that beast, it was more than a mass of shadow to him, and the memory was clearer for it. Like a great, twisted rodent it forced its way through the split in the air, coalescing in a nightmarish shadow shape. It dove, went unreal and opened its endless maw--the feel of those gnashing teeth as they clipped his neck--the way they tore at him, cut through his flesh--the hot rush of blood and agony--

Julian had been gravely wounded by that beast--Jaskier hadn't noticed, he had been too stunned by the appearance of it. He could feel the rush of blood down Julian's neck now, the terrible thrumming agony of that wound--oh, how sorry he was.

Jaskier's guilt colored the memory, darkened it just so, but it was impossible to miss the shape of the Witcher as he threw the creature aside. The Witcher dove and fought the creature. He drove it down, valiantly, pinned it and--Julian's stomach lurched and Jaskier let out a shuddering sigh--they watched as he was then, summarily, torn apart. Julian's vision went dark on the edges as Geralt was ripped into, as those teeth gored him chunk by chunk. When the creature escaped the binding of that silver blade, just as Julian started forward to his side, the Witcher yanked his hand free from Jaskier's hold.

The spell ended the very instant he broke contact.

They were, the both of them, sitting in a cool room above a tavern in Ursi.

The candle at the Witcher's hip flickered with the draft from the open window.

Jaskier's vision spotted over with bursts of light and shadow. He was so very tired and the body he wore hadn't the energy to maintain their posture without him to drive it. He sagged forward and caught himself, just barely, with his elbows against his splayed knees. The floor before him was splattered with blood and discolored rings left over from the evaporated alcohol. The Witcher, still kneeling at his feet, breathed in great heaving gasps and tasted metallic, like the lingering flavor of pain. He didn't calm, not in the time it took Jaskier's vision to clear, and the bard looked sidelong at him.

He was terribly shaken and, Jaskier supposed, that was understandable.

It was not often that someone watched themselves being ripped to shreds.

"It--" he started and paused as those gold eyes snapped to him, bright but utterly unfocused. "It's alright, I--it was undone."

Something in that made the human move, drove him to rise. Jaskier watched him as he dragged his bag to the low table and started frantically unpacking his supplies. The shape of him danced in the dimness and, unfortunately, it wasn't long before Jaskier gave into his weariness and passed out. If the Witcher noticed his silence and slumber, Jaskier had no idea, but he slept for quite a while.


	5. Small Kindnesses

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently I am all about writing stitches and medical care lately? I have no idea why.

Jaskier awoke with an impressively severe hangover. 

The groan that pulled out of his throat was the death knell of a drunken fool--it was a thick and uncomfortable sound. It carried all the weight of every party he had ever attended, all the regrets and hazy flavors of wines and ales he'd gleefully downed whilst strumming. His mind, still clinging to the blessed edges of comfort, slumber, and the kind darkness behind his eyelids was loathe to return to the unforgiving light of day. On reflex, as his head's aching rose from a bare simmer to a rolling boil, he cursed into his bedding. His head swam and throbbed, his limbs ached, and his mouth tasted of dried cotton and something terribly foul. At least the bed behind him was soft and the silk of his bedclothes was soft and comfortable. 

He twisted, determined to plunge himself back into glorious sleep, tried to bury his face into the pillows, and was rendered instantly alert as a bolt of pain carved down the length of his left arm. He gasped, sharp and loud, and jerked upright. Jaskier threw off the blankets that covered him and curled forward, shielding his hurt on reflex. The barbed twist of agony was more clarifying than any hangover remedy could ever match, but that clarity came at cost. His head and arm pounded in time with one another, glittering with acute needling aches. His thoughts were mired in mud and his eyes far too sensitive, despite remaining closed--even the pinkish light that filtered through them was far, far too much.

Every inch of Julian ached and, oh, the rising nausea that clawed at the back of his throat--

The floor creaked somewhere alongside him, somewhere below him, and a hand settled on his back, large and heavy. It weighed him down like an anchor, heavy enough that Julian's skin could hardly shiver and crawl beneath it, and it smoothed over his doublet with gradual, even force. Wait, his doublet? 

Had he gone to sleep wearing clothing? 

With someone else?

Those two things were not rare, at least not when taken individually, but the likelihood of both at once was rather low.

Jaskier blinked blearily--his eyelids felt dry and sticky. They pulled against his eyes as he forced them apart--how much had he drank? He vaguely recalled a bottle, huddling it between his hands, but that seemed so long ago.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the blinding, beaming, white sunshine--it took moments more for the light to seem less relentless. He peered up at the man beside the bed and, as he moved between the light and Julian's poor ailing eyes, Jaskier let out a little surprised sound--his warm amber eyes and white hair were just as dazzling in the morning light as they had been at dusk. The Witcher was haloed in streaming sunlight, made soft and warm around the edges by how it bled around him, and Jaskier lamented that he had not bothered to learn to paint. His smile went soppy and delighted for just a moment, caught up in the brief and pleasant surprise of the Witcher's presence, but that delight soured as the rest of his mind finished waking. He stared up at the somber, handsome face for only a few seconds of blissful (relative) contentment before the last night finally trickled back into his mind.

He felt himself pale as all the memory, all the sensation rolled back through him. Even the weight of the Witcher's hand couldn't quell the shiver that danced down his spine, then. His humor drained away from him as steadily and swiftly as Julian's blood had flowed from his arm. His smile fell and his face went strained and sad as he stared up at the Witcher. The Witcher, for his part, didn't reclaim the hand against his back or give him an unkind look. If anything, the man seemed vaguely--something. Jaskier stared at the look on the Witcher's face, at the way he was stood alongside the bed, and felt strangely lost. The man had curious emotions and Jaskier, thin as he felt, couldn't reach and taste them. He wasn't entirely sure what to make of the Witcher's expression. He didn't know what the rounded edges of that look meant--not on the Witcher's face, at least.

The human tipped his chin at Jaskier's arm and held out a tin cup full of water.

"You should drink," he advised, his tone as even and indecipherable as his face. "There's a pitcher on the table, if you can walk. Bread as well." 

"If I can--?" Jaskier's gaze darted from the man that loomed above him and danced over the shape of his legs. The blankets were drawn up around him, he couldn't see more than the outline of them, but they both moved as he tested them. His confusion and the brief spike of panic must have danced over his face--the Witcher's hand shifted against his back and smoothed a short distance to his shoulder.

"You collapsed and then passed out," he explained, slowly, as one might speak to a child--or, Jaskier recognized, a drunk. Jaskier looked back at him and found those gold eyes staring at him hard. He picked apart Julian's countenance, took care when looking over the details of Julian's face, and the Witcher's brow dipped just slightly as he...tried to gauge how much Jaskier remembered? Tried to decide if he was apt to pass out? It was hard to say. For a brief moment, Jaskier considered whether it would be best to let the human imagine the answers to his questions or not, to start the conversation about the night ahead, or leave it be. Ultimately, Jaskier wasn't sure what was best, and so he decided on neither course. This situation was too strange, even for him.

He took the cup from the Witcher and drank it greedily.

"Yes." Jaskier was glad for the roughness of his throat as he spoke. It hid his leery hesitation. "That does sound like something I would do." He cradled the cup in his hands and, as he drank, the Witcher withdrew the hand he had resting on his shoulder. He watched as the Witcher stepped back, as he shifted his arms slowly and folded them across his chest. He was dressed in a grey shirt, in black leggings, and wasn't--he didn't have his medallion on? Jaskier couldn't see the necklace, nor the cord, and his shirt wasn't thick enough or loose enough to disguise--

"You should eat, then go."

Jaskier recoiled at that, nearly choking on the sudden wash of water he'd accidentally tried to inhale--he blinked repeatedly and sputtered as he lowered the cup. When he recovered, his eyes darted to the Witcher's chest and then up to meet his gaze. Something like certainty had settled on the Witcher's face, had replaced the oddness in his expression, and it was already settling into the hardening lines of his stance. Jaskier twisted and felt all of Julian's muscles groan under the strain. He dragged his legs free from the blankets, slung them over the edge of the bed, and then had to pause--the sudden rush of movement had his head spinning, the space behind his head beat in time with his pulse-- _shit_ , he needed more water or--he had no idea what he needed--how long had it been since he had exhausted himself this thoroughly? Aretuza? Cidaris? Had it been this bad when he first took a body? He couldn't recall--

"What!?" he asked, or yelled, depending on how one interpreted those two actions. The volume of his voice was a nail driven into his own skull, right above the ears. The Witcher, in all his stoic, mid-morning splendor, didn't seem all that bothered by his shouting. He did seem wary of letting Jaskier rise unaided--and that was a confusing shift. The Witcher leaned in as he moved, hands lifting just slightly, as if to stop him? Jaskier swung a hand out, batted the Witcher's aside, and he felt a rush of determination. Jaskier glowered as he abruptly, and foolishly pushed himself up, onto his feet. It was a maneuver born largely of spite, of his abrupt and rather contrary desire to avoid being coddled and dismissed, and he regretted it the moment all his blood rushed to his head.

It was a rather difficult trick, holding onto a glower when one's vision spotted over in black, but he managed it. How kind of the Witcher to stay put for the duration.

"Don't--" the Witcher started but thought better of it once Jaskier had regained his feet. His brow dipped, just slightly, and his hands hovered uselessly, lingering where Jaskier had batted them, but he made no further move to stop him from moving about as he pleased.

That was mollifying, at least, and Jaskier took a deep breath as he watched the Witcher reclaim some of his previous stance.

It was an impressively, staggeringly magnanimous offer that the Witcher put before him. Well, in _theory_. Encouraging Jaskier to leave, to save his own skin, now that he'd been granted knowledge of the dangers afoot? It was a kindness, the likes of which Jaskier was unaccustomed to witnessing, let alone being on the receiving end of. Jaskier felt a vague and distant appreciation for the human, for the effort he put into protecting him--he was sure he did, he could feel it somewhere behind the pounding in his head and the bile rising in his gut--but all it managed to do was fuel Jaskier's anger. 

This fool, this idiot, this absolutely--this _Witcher_ had seen a sight so horrific it made a _fae_ creature recoil and weep, he'd watched himself be shredded apart by a beast of the oldest and most terrible order, and had decided to go it alone? He'd thought it over and come to the conclusion that shooing the little mage away was the best course? That he could, by some miracle, fight the beast on his own?

It was a noble gesture--it made Jaskier's heart clench and a memory of wildflowers and straw dance across the back of his throat. It made him furious.

The very shape of the Witcher's plan was so absurd, there were no words. His offense was beyond measure, so far beyond measure and reason that it took Jaskier a long moment of red-faced glowering to realize that he was terrified. Julian was frozen with it and, truly, he could not blame the man...but _Jaskier_ was terrified. He was livid with his terror, with his apprehension...and the fact that, by everything that had or would ever be, he wished he could accept the Witcher's offer.

How desperately he wanted to accept the Witcher's offer and flee. 

If he could, if there was any chance his compact would not be called upon, oh, he would have vanished in a moment and evaded that creature for the rest of time. He had never been violent, he had never been cruel, and that creature fed on both--it was an avatar of fear and hunger and Jaskier was crippled by the thought of having to face it, having to contest it. He would be driven to, he knew--he would have _wept_ to take the Witcher's offer and flee, he would have composed ballads to the man, sung of his deeds for all of time, long after the last Witcher had been reduced to dust--but he couldn't. 

He was bound here.

 _Cowardice_ was the name of it, the feeling that crept into him. It was common enough, something he'd been granted somewhere in the dull villages after the fall of Cidaris. He had understood it, to a point, but now he felt it. It was a realization jarring enough that his breath shook as he drew it. The defense that wanted to claw up him, that rose in Julian's chest, was not his own...but he took it all the same. He was terrified! He was terrified for himself, for the Witcher, for the children of Ursi--of course he wanted to flee! It was sensible to flee! He could barely comprehend how to fight--Julian had tried once and-- _oh._

_Oh, no._

This idiot--this...poor mortal thought he could combat one of the _other_ beasts alone?

Fuck.

That meant the Witcher had no idea what he was fighting. He had no idea what to do...or what it would do to him. What it could do to him.

If he had even the slightest inkling of what that thing was...he would have been cowering just as eagerly as Jaskier.

Wouldn't he?

Jaskier was red to his ears--his face a sickening storm of emotion and dread--and all that blood that rose made him swoon. He hadn't enough blood left to waste it on petty fury or frustration. He turned from the Witcher, his anger clear in the flat press of his lips, and stumbled as he stalked toward the table. His first step was halting and the Witcher, worried or pragmatic or something Jaskier could not taste because he was too weak to manage it--fuck, fuck, fuck--reached and pressed a hand into the space between Julian's shoulders, just to steady him. He let out a furious, fuming whine and whirled on the man as he walked, dislodging that helpful hand and all but backing into the table as he did so. He waved both his empty cup and his forefinger at the human and--for just a moment, he was beyond words.

Just for a moment.

"You, good sir, have the intellectual capacity of--of--of a bag of soggy river rocks!" Jaskier seethed and was out of breath before his lackluster insult was done.

He dropped back, flopped into the chair by the table, and tried to look as angry and imposing as he could. His attempt at dramatic fury was undercut by the pallor of Julian's skin and by the obvious strain he endured as he pour himself another cup of water. He glowered as he struggled but the effect was middling and unimpressive, overall. It certainly didn't shake the Witcher to watch him. 

Julian was in a poor state--he would have buckled and collapsed under a strong breeze and the both of them knew it.

It was fine. This was fine.

The Witcher's expression shifted less than Jaskier had expected it would, given his anger and the bite of his schoolyard insult, but the shift it underwent did go in a direction that Jaskier could decode. The rounded edges on his face, the shallow resignation were cast aside as the whole of his rugged features abruptly tinted with open frustration. The human's brows dipped and he propped his hands on his hips as he glared down at the bard. Jaskier was seated at an odd angle, one leg propped at the knee, dangling over the arm-rest of the wooden chair, but he didn't care. He endeavored to look casual, comfortable even, as he greedily drank his cup full of water and poured himself a third.

"You're not equipped to--"

"A-a-a--" Jaskier cut him off and all but slammed the pitcher onto the table. He lacked the strength to really do more than set it down hard. The irritation on the Witcher's face spiked as he was interrupted and silenced but, for some reason, he allowed it. "Are we forgetting which of us turned back time to spare the other a tragic and horrifyingly indecorous death?" Jaskier snapped, livid, and instantly questioned why he'd thrown out the reminder. That was not a wise thing to prod at, the manner in which he'd saved this Witcher's life--if this man was schooled in magics, if he had any idea what mortal mages could do--could mortal mages bend time? Jaskier had no idea--he had never wondered, had never checked--not even with Rosalind--

 _Oh_.

Oh, but even thinking that name cut his legs from beneath him. 

The memory struck him like a blow to the chest and Jaskier wheezed out a slow, tight breath as it consumed him and then passed. His gaze drifted with it, his expression went slack, and he found himself staring at the space between the Witcher and the wall behind him. He didn't see the way the Witcher's expression went stiff or sorry, nor how his frustration looked wrong-footed for a moment before it righted itself. A symphony played out on the Witcher's face, quick and quiet, written in shades of subtle stoicism, and Jaskier missed every single note.

"Besides--" Jaskier said, breathed without inflection, sounding just as winded and lost as he truly was. He drifted as he reclaimed his thoughts and his eyes tracked back up to the Witcher's face. He picked up speed, then, regained some of his determination and fed it back into his words. His anger, unfortunately, had flown. It couldn't carry him. "I won't go--" He said and there was some certainty there, some admission hidden in the speed at which he carried on, "I can't go, I told you I would help. A promise is a promise, after all."

The Witcher pulled a face and scoffed very rudely.

"I'm not in the habit of holding people to drunken promises they make while trying to fuck me," the Witcher spat, injecting ire into those last two words like they were an insult, a cudgel to be used against Jaskier, to stun him out of arguing. His hands flexed where they rested against his hips and his glower became sharp, pronounced. "Particularly not when they end up being life or death commitments."

"Well I am," Jaskier snapped back and moved to slam his little tin cup down on the table. It splashed water over his hand and he started a bit as he shook it off. 

"What?" The Witcher's expression twisted with open, bold-faced confusion. Jaskier let out a huff and blustered wordlessly, senselessly as he rose from his seat. It took him an uncomfortable length of time and overmuch scrambling to regain his feet--his struggling embarrassed him, yes, but it seemed to embarrass the Witcher more. He counted it as a victory, in the end.

"That is to say: I do not break my oaths, good, _Sir Witcher_ ," Jaskier told him and let some haughtiness sneak into his tone as he tried to hide the increased depth and speed of his breathing. His limbs were already trembling with the strain of so much sudden movement. He was still so weak, even he couldn't imagine how he could help--but he would not be turned away, no matter how he wanted to be, no matter how terrible his fear...because he couldn't.

He couldn't turn away any more than he could lie to this man's face.

"Look," the Witcher said, his tone flat but suspiciously neutral--it made the Jaskier's hackles rise--or were they Julians? He stepped closer, his hands unfolding to hover, awkwardly, in the space alongside Jaskier's upper arms. He let out a burst of breath through his nose, not a sigh but only just, and his face reverted to that perfect, tempered steel resignation. "I'm not going to fuck you."

Whatever he'd been expecting the Witcher to say, it was not that. Jaskier startled and let out a squawk of indignation--the Witcher soldiered on:

"You're already going to faint from blood-loss and-- _magical_ bullshit," he pointed out, rather gamely, and his hands fell away from the space next to Jaskier's arms. He drew a deep breath and tried to inject some shade of politeness or apology into his face--honestly Jaskier had no idea which it was and he lacked the wherewithal to gauge--then he gestured to the space by the door. "Just take your things and go."

He folded his arms and, with a note of finality: "I am a Witcher. Killing monsters is what I do."

Jaskier stared up at him, agape and beyond words--well, beyond most words. After a moment of sheer disbelief:

"Piss off!" 

He lurched forward, planted both his hands on the Witcher's chest, and shoved him as hard as he could. This really achieved very little. The Witcher didn't move so much as he swayed, just so, and even that had to be a concession. Jaskier felt a snapping staccato of pain bolt down Julian's left arm as he shoved and, if that weren't enough, the force of it was enough that he managed to knock himself over and back into the chair. The chair wobbled precariously under his sudden weight, but it held, and he sucked in a sharp breath. Not a moment later he cursed vividly, loudly, and clutched his wounded arm to his chest. When he glared up at the Witcher, the human wore a keenly frustrated, long-suffering expression.

"I'm trying _very hard_ to be nice to you, you stubborn idiot," the Witcher seethed, real anger creeping back into his voice again. His footfalls resounded through the wooden floor as he stomped around the table and retrieved that black bag of his. 

"This is nice?" Jaskier asked, incredulous, voice pitched so high with his surprise it was nearly a whine. The Witcher's glower deepened with earnest, undisguised emotion, as he stomped back to Jaskier's side and he let out a huff as he dropped the bag on the table. He loomed a moment, probably just because he could, before taking a seat in front of the bard--he was close enough that the furious twist of frustration came off him in a warming wave, like campfire light, and Jaskier found himself relaxing just a touch as it settled his stomach.

This was idiotic. 

He couldn't savor, couldn't draw from this man--he was a Witcher and just as likely to stab him as chat with him. He was already more than halfway to drawing a knife on Jaskier--if he started sampling his emotions, he'd end up bloodied in a ditch. Besides, frustration? Fury? These weren't stable things, they weren't what he needed. This was not adoration, not joy or delight or pleasure, and Jaskier knew what they would feel like if he used them. They were sticky, sickly things that turned his stomach--they were barely enough to sustain him, they wouldn't even begin to restore the power he'd expended. 

He had expended so much. Damn it all--

He must have been truly ailing if open disdain was so refreshing.

The Witcher growled and held out a hand, waited for the bard to present his arm, and Jaskier growled back before he offered the appendage up. Despite the mood, the tension in their words and the lingering argument, the Witcher was very careful as he unwrapped the rapidly bloodying bandage. His fingers were clumsy, this was not a task he was given to preforming, but he took great pains to be cautious as he moved. His touch was soft enough, delicate enough, that Julian barely felt the tug of his errors when he fumbled or pulled too sharply. This experience was a far cry from the Witcher he'd awoken in the night and Jaskier was, to put it mildly, deeply confused. It was hard to hang on to his anger, his frustration and offense, and it seemed like the Witcher was facing the same problem.

Jaskier watched as the human's shoulders gradually relaxed, as he sighed and fell into an easier posture while he worked. It was comfortable but, by that very same token, it was alarming. That he was being so gentle, that he had exerted real effort in an attempt to be _"nice"_ when he was clearly ill-equipped for both--

Had something happened?

Shit, had he discovered something so dreadful that it had mellowed the razor sharpness of him? 

Had he explored while Jaskier slept? Had he started down the path to accepting his death?

His alarm must have been palatable, must have danced on his face, because the Witcher's gold eyes snapped up to meet his.

"I will use _Axii_ on you again if you can't keep calm," he threatened grouchily and Jaskier huffed faintly. He held the Witcher's gaze a moment longer and then rolled his eyes to break the moment--it was a contrary whim and it made the Witcher's disdain spike in the air between them.

"So help me, dear Witcher, you are very fortunate that you're stunning," Jaskier told him, his tone just as dry and unkind as the Witcher's, even if the words were utterly true. The man pulled a face again, one Jaskier didn't understand, and Jaskier huffed as the Witcher shook his head. Julian's heart raced, fueled by the confluence of panic and nearness, and Jaskier fumbled as he retrieved his half full tin cup from the table. It wasn't long before the Witcher had the bandage pulled away and Jaskier grimaced as he caught a glance of his arm.

When he looked away the Witcher watched him but, in yet another small kindness, said nothing.

Every time Jaskier looked at that wound he felt a spike of guilt so powerful it felt like it might collapse his chest. Today, in the mid-morning light, it was a brackish red rift, swollen and tight, decorated on all sides in an assortment colorful, blossoming bruises and the imprint of spidering veins. Now, it bled anew--the bleeding was sluggish compared to last night, a bare trickle instead of a quick rushing flow, and Jaskier tried to forget the look of torn skin. The stitches he'd ripped apart hung loose and the look of them would haunt him.

He would heal it. He knew he could restore it in an instant, wipe away any mark or gash or memory of it. The very moment he had the energy to spare, it would be gone...but he didn't have energy to spare. Forcing Julian to suffer it that wound, even if the man was barely a thread of consciousness within him...it was...complicated and, to Jaskier's mind: cruel. It hurt Jaskier's heart, the thought of the man suffering--and that was strange, given how opaque and inhuman his heart truly was.

The Witcher must have interpreted his discomfort, his averted gaze for something else, for some mundane reaction that a human might've had, and read a shade of meaning there that Jaskier did not intend. The man shifted as he tended the wound, wrapped a hand around Julian's limp one, and softly smoothed his thumb over Julian's wrist. It was a calming movement, if nothing else, and the simple ease of it was yet another thing in direct opposition to their arguing. The Witcher hummed in a neutral sort of way(, a warning perhaps,) and set about removing the old stitching. He was careful and each time the tendons in Julian's arm twitched the Witcher would run his calloused thumb back across his wrist.

It was a confusing series of actions and Jaskier found himself absorbed in them, in the study of them. The air still tasted of frustration and anger, but it was turning stale. Unstable, that, it was why he didn't care to feed on it. Jaskier finished the water in his cup and stared over the rim, into the hollow of it.

"I'm going to stay," Jaskier told him. He didn't shout it and, to his credit, the Witcher didn't reply with any snappish nonsense. Their argument, it seemed, was over. "I've no idea how to kill one of...that, if it can be killed. But if you're--" He took a deep breath. He didn't notice the light trembling that crawled up his arms, then, but the Witcher did. "I can't undo it again, not like I did, but that pin I placed...I can return to it if--" He took a very deep breath and Julian's heart felt tight in his chest. He didn't notice how the Witcher's hands stilled for a beat.

"If we fail."

Again.

The Witcher was silent and Jaskier's words hung over them like a noose dangling from the rafters. The silence persisted as he worked, as he pulled the stitches out one by one and, once he had finished, he settled Julian's arm in his lap. The scraps of cloth in his bag were new, Jaskier noted, and this time he cleaned Julian's arm with a much more delicate touch. He used the room-cool water on the table, wiped carefully and dried, rather than simply drenching Julian's arm with a bottle of hellfire--which, as if he had summoned it with the very thought, appeared in the Witcher's hands not more than a moment later. He looked up at Jaskier as he unstoppered that bottle--ah, the smell was nearly enough to make him retch.

"I had wondered what you were babbling about," the Witcher admitted and sounded nonplussed. If he hadn't been caught up in a truly heated exchange with the human, not a few minutes earlier, he would never have guessed he could express that much feeling. It was impressive, how stoic and stony his face could become. The Witcher hefted the bottle of clear alcohol and sloshed a good deal of it onto the rag he was using. "Can't say I'm shocked that a spell like that requires flesh and blood."

There was a whole melody of disapproval in his tone as he said that but, fortunately, his golden eyes were set firmly on his work. Jaskier hissed loudly as he pressed the alcohol soaked rag into his wound and that flash of pain handily disguised his confusion. The sting caught his tongue before he could say or do something foolish--like correcting the Witcher's misconception. Explaining why he had to use Julian was infinitely more complex than a requisite involving flesh--the idea of that conversation was less appealing than the injury on his arm.

Jaskier hummed tightly and closed his eyes against the sunlight, against the sight of the Witcher at work on his arm. His fingers toyed with the tin cup in his hand, shifted and fidgeted it nervously--the weight and cold touch of the metal was a kindness, an easy distraction--it was also a wondrous balm for his thundering headache. He let out a quiet, content sigh as he pressed it against Julian's temple. Silence reined for a time and, once the Witcher finished cleaning his wound properly, Jaskier spoke again.

"I don't suppose you've killed many creatures that traverse the space between the spheres?" Jaskier asked, his tone a masterwork of lilting mysticism and utter nihilistic misery. The Witcher grunted in reply and set about putting new stitches into Julian's arm. These hurt far more than the last though, admittedly, it was hard to really gauge. They took longer--likely because they had to move so much farther in from the edges of the actual cut than the last set--and Jaskier couldn't help but grimace each time he felt the prick of the needle. Despite his desire to wallow in silent misery, he let out short, breathy sounds as the human sewed, sighing with discomfort at each draw of the thread.

To his credit, the Witcher did not harangue him for his array of whining little noises. He had seemed like the type who might and, well, Jaskier felt bad for that assumption even as he made it.

The Witcher was a strange man, was very fond of threats, but he hadn't actually seemed to relish in Jaskier's discomfort.

In fact, as he thought on it, the man had gone out of his way to make him feel better.

Was that why the medallion--

"Define many," the Witcher said and Jaskier started as his thoughts were soundly interrupted. He cracked open an eye to look sidelong at the human, a thread of hope blossoming in his chest.

"Any."

Perhaps--if they were very lucky--

"Then...no," the Witcher admitted and Jaskier, stunned, let out a snort of laughter. This was a mistake as it jostled his arm and caused the Witcher's needle to skip and jab him in a very tender part of his wound. Jaskier hissed and the Witcher murmured a quiet apology before moving back to task.

"Pretty and funny, how unfair," Jaskier complained but it lacked anything resembling heat. His hope curdled behind his ribs but he didn't feel the loss of it too keenly. "I have only ever avoided them," Jaskier admitted, with more ease than he had expected to find in that statement. The Witcher's requisite hum was tinged with curiosity and, well, Jaskier supposed that counted as a question. If a vague one.

He was given to filling silence with words. He saw no reason to stop, now.

"I haven't seen this one in so very long--I wasn't sure it was still... _here,_ " he continued and closed his eyes again as he pressed that cup against his forehead, just between his brows. The metal was warming but the solid curve of it was pleasant in a different way. "It's a vicious, hungry thing that likes children especially." He sighed and, in a thought that was only half formed: "Fearful creature, moves like a nightmare."

Jaskier let out a sigh as he thought back, as he ran through the images of the Pankratz home and what horror it had wrought there. The scene was detached in his mind, something Julian had not witnessed, and it gave him so little help. He could recall with such staggering clarity--but it was just shapes and pieces, abstract and worthless, like shards of glass scattered on a floor. He hardly noticed as the Witcher finished his stitches, as the human's hands went still and his thumb paused across Julian's wrist again.

"All shadows and shapes in the moonlight, nothing but teeth and dancing darkness," Jaskier mused darkly, a slight tune curving into his words as he let them wander. What a terrible song--fuck, he was a terrible bard, wasn't he? He drew a breath, intending to continue his melancholy musing, but sputtered as the tin cup pressed to his face was snatched from his grip. He jerked back and blinked his eyes open to find the Witcher leaned in close. Leaned in very close, in fact, close enough that when Jaskier's eyes danced over his face, he was too near for Jaskier to look down and see his mouth. He resisted the urge to lean, either forward or away.

"I had it pinned," the Witcher said and that hard gold gaze held, stared directly into Jaskier's eyes, searching for something. His sudden focus was overwhelming and it took a moment for Jaskier to catch up--in the end, all he could manage was a short, jagged nod in response. Yes, that was right, wasn't it? He had pinned it. 

"How?"

Jaskier didn't understand his question, not immediately, and he was sure the human could read it on his face.

He had shown the Witcher, had lent him Julian's eyes and body--but, then again, Julian hadn't been quite as stable a vehicle as he usually was. Jaskier was certain that the images of that dreadful evening would haunt him, but what if he hadn't shown the Witcher clearly? He hadn't been nearly as alert as the last time he'd shared memory--it had been a faded shadow of what he'd attempted to do, had he failed? The Witcher had seen a shaky view through Julian's eyes as Julian bled out onto the forest floor--some details might have gone a bit fuzzy for him, if he saw them at all.

That was a rather large detail to have missed and, in that moment, Jaskier felt his stomach drop. Had the Witcher seen anything at all? Had he exhausted himself for nothing?

Jaskier's eyes danced a bit as he forced himself to recall the night that had been, the one yet to come--or most accurately, the night he wished to avoid entirely. He was not given to misremembering, it was not how his people worked, but he was not eager to recall those events at all, leastwise with his own perfect clarity. He swallowed around a grimace as the whole ordeal danced past his eyes again, shades of memory and afterimages of shadow cutting into the shapes that actually sat before his eyes. Oh, but it was dreadful--to watch the places where the Witcher's face aligned with the other time, with his form as it was dismembered.

"You wrestled it down, overpowered it," Jaskier told him, swallowed around the bile rising in Julian's throat, and the Witcher let out a frustrated sound. His hand still held on to Julian's wrist--his fingers tightened then, shook the limb, but the movement was cautious--nothing grazed his wound, nothing hurt.

"What else? There had to be something else. What did I use? Potions, weapons, spells?"

Jaskier's mouth parted, absently, and an unflattering 'uh' crept out as his thoughts stalled. His attention had not been wholly focused on the Witcher, not beyond the knowledge that he was there, that he moved and attacked--he had been so focused on the _other_ beast.... He could recall it, could go watch it all again as it was, but that was an unappealing prospect. Jaskier stared at the amber eyes before him, the eager, desperate curiosity, and swallowed down his discomfort. He closed his eyes, then, and tried to bring the whole of it to the forefront of his mind. Julian's memory was intertwined with his own, unfortunately, and while he'd prefer to extract the two from each other, he needed both at his behest if he wanted to answer the Witcher's questions. 

His body felt jagged and raw as he ran through the events with a careful, discerning level of attention. Julian, the poor man, could hardly tell the difference between memory and reality--he flinched harder than Jaskier would have liked as the creature attacked him. He recoiled just so, crushed the desire to actually move, and forced himself still as he watched it all again in absolute detail. The hand on his wrist tightened once more and he felt Julian's pulse hammer wildly against the pressure of the Witcher's thumb. The pressure did little to help as his body relived those moments in vivid detail, walking the memory again like a living dream. 

He had nearly reached the end again when the Witcher shook him sharply and he was pulled back to the rented room and the inn in Ursi. He blinked back to the present, just this side of dazed and let out a quick, uncomfortable breath.

"What?" Jaskier snapped, annoyed by the disruption and more than a little nauseous with the reminder of it all. His hands flexed and fingers brushed each other as the sensation of ichor and mud faded back to nothing. It was unpleasant but temporary.

"What are you doing?" the Witcher asked, quietly and urgently, his brow dipped in concern. Jaskier was dumbstruck by the question and the tone he'd used--he was doing as he was asked. His confusion was obvious but something in it seemed to mystify the Witcher. The man held Julian's wrist tightly and his frown persisted as long as Julian's heart raced.

"I'm trying to recall how you got it under you--if you'll let me think--it's not an easy memory to navigate," Jaskier told him impatiently, haltingly, and a sort of horrified understanding dawned on the Witcher's face. The human leaned back and away quickly, but he didn't rise, and he didn't release Julian's arm. Fortunately, Jaskier didn't feel the need to dive back into the whole ordeal again and settled, instead, for sighing and giving his account: "You dove onto it, flipped it, pinned it against the forest floor. You had a silver blade--you drove it through the beast's maw and into the soil--"

This was what he had told the Witcher before--he'd overpowered it. He'd wrestled it to the ground. There was nothing new to glean from what he said now--Jaskier let out a hum of agitation as he found himself lacking words, once more. The Witcher wanted information and, quite frankly, Jaskier wished he could provide it. He wished he could stretch out and see the shapes of the forest, the plains, and learn what had twisted Ursi this way. Learn how the strange things that the Witcher wore interacted with creatures from beyond the sphere, how his weapon had managed to trap an immortal creature against the fabric of this plane. He wished he had the answer, but he didn't--this wasn't as simple as feeling the whorling chaos or tracing a line of destiny--

What was he missing?

Jaskier felt that nagging sensation in the center of his chest as he pondered. That hollow place inside him itched and yawned as he looked at the Witcher. 

The Witcher would know what he needed to look for, would understand the shades of the memory, but Jaskier was too weak to share his own memory with him. To conjure the memory beyond Julian's experience, or even to conjure Julian's memory again, would all but deplete him. But how else could he know what to look for? How else could Jaskier find what he needed? The Witcher's experiences were so far removed from his own, so strange and uncommon, that the details he might have seen, what he would have deemed worthy of note, was utterly beyond Jaskier. He didn't know what he didn't know and, once again, it gnawed at him. The absence of want, of a shape for his desire, was infinitely more frustrating than just lacking something. 

What didn't he know to look for? 

What details would help a Witcher?

"It whipped around, promptly mauled you, and then burst free the moment your hand let go of your sword," Jaskier snapped, frustration with his own inability to help finally boiling over. The Witcher was still looking at him with that impossible intensity and--he had no idea what to do about it. He could talk, could explain it a hundred different ways until he ran out of florid poetry, and--actually--that...wasn't a terrible idea. He could describe the whole of it, in every excruciating detail, and hope he mentioned something that might help. He had no idea what it might be, nor any way to whittle down the possibilities, but they had no other recourse.

Fortunately, words were something Jaskier could manage. 

He was _extremely eloquent_ , regardless of how poorly he'd done thus far.

"Alright," he began again, calming his own voice and steeling himself. Jaskier let out a long, slow breath and closed his eyes, braced to speak as he watched it unfold, and he felt the grip on his wrist loosen...but it didn't vanish. "I'll begin again."


End file.
